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Leaving deviantART

All good things must come to an end.
It's time to say "Good-bye, my friend."

This has been a rough decision for me to make this past month, but I feel it's time to finally time to follow through with my plans. I'm officially leaving deviantART. No, this is not some sort of joke, I'm really meaning it this time around. As many of my watchers know, I deleted everything on my account April Fools Day as sort of a joke that fell through horribly. I wish I would have just left everything as it was back then because this time around it has been more difficult. No, this account is not being hacked either like I tried to pull off April Fools Day as well. I'm just tired of deviantART and everything that has been going on with this account. The news article, my personal artwork, the lack of motivation to do anything related to this site any longer...

By this point, I'm sure you're asking yourself, "Why?" Well, there are two main reasons why I'm leaving. First reason why I'm leaving is because of TDoD. Yes, the news article I started almost a year ago featuring dragon related artwork. It has become a chore instead of something I just like to do for fun. It shouldn't be a chore and hassle! I honestly never though that this news article, something that was suppose to be fun, would turn into the nightmare it has. It's not the work load that is grieving me, it's people pile on me demanding to be featured without remotely reading the rules and then when I politely deny them, they get all pissy with me and decide to try and take their revenge out on me for not posting either their stolen/traced picture or their picture that has little to no effort put into it. My computer has had more DOS attacks on it in the last two months than it has in the year and a half I've owned it. None of them have even managed to succeed, but it's the fact that someone has tried to do it. I'm tired of dealing with it.

The second major reason why I'm leaving is also related to TDoD, but in the long run it's not. Because of TDoD, my account has been flooded with new traffic like I would never have believed. While at first I thought it would be a plus for my artwork and more critiques on them, it has shown me that it has not helped my art, but has actually made traffic to my artwork worsen. Before I took on the task of making TDoD, I would at least get good critiques on my work. Now, I'm lucky if I get one good helpful comment. Critiquing is what makes an artist grow and without it... where is my motivation? Commenting "That's so nice." or "That's pretty." doesn't help me. It shows me that either that they are robots and could give a rats ass what anything looked like and reply with the same exact thing on every picture they came across or the person giving the comment is too lazy to actually look over the picture and help an artist out. My thoughts are with the later of the two. deviantART is an art community, yes, but the people here just don't care and those that actually do care are so few an far between that it's almost impossible to find them. Honestly think about it, how many of you have actually given a good solid critique on someone's picture? When they say, "It's all about the art," yeah it's all about the art all right, but not critiquing it. I'll openly admit that some of my comments can be rather slim at times but I at least look over the picture to see if there is anything I can pull out of it to help the creator of the picture. At least my comments were more than one or two words long.

Some of the minor things bothering me two is ther sheer number of people that has increased in stealing other people's artwork here on this site. Last month, I submit over 50 copyright violations of people ripping artwork, and that was just within dA alone! Too many people just don't care about reporting stolen artwork. I've even had someone tell me before that I didn't need to report stolen artwork because that was the admins job. WTF?! The other little thing nagging at me is when people watch this account, mainly because of TDoD, they expect me to watch their account back. May sound mean of me, but I only watch someone because I like their artwork, not because they watched me back. I honestly annoys the hell out of me when people come to be asking me to watch them back or comment on their artwork, A.K.A. "Give me more pageviews so I can become popular." If they do ask, I will watch them, but I don't look at their artwork, journals, etc. from them. Within a few weeks I usually remove them from my list. So to the 10 or so people that have done this to me in the last month, if you want people to look at your artwork, don't ask people to watch your account! That's the biggest thing that turns people away from actually watching your account. Your best bet is to promote your artwork on the forums and chatrooms.

Be mad at me if you want to, but I'm just stating what I feel at this time.

As for those of you that have actually managed to read this far and actually CARE, I'm yet again taking down my entire gallery. You'll now be able to see my artwork and any future artwork to come on my personal website sushibarstudios.com I'll still be finishing my to-do list, but all art will be posted there. It's still under construction since the web builder there is crap, but hopefully it'll be finished withing the week. As for my journals and TDoD, the journals will stay but TDoD is finished for. I'll be posting Issue 42 and 43 like I promised, but after that it will be no more. I ask that TDoD NOT be picked up either because I do plan on keeping this account open and hopefully one day after I've had some time to brainstorm on how to redo the entire submission system I'll pick it back up. For now, enjoy *tyshadragon's news article Devious Dragons.

I bid thee all a fair well and until next time,
R. Swyear