curious-cecil - Tumblr blog

[curious-cecil]

Sorry for kinda late post for the week. I still haven't finished this piece so that I would have something. A lot of current work on the project is writing and not stuff that can be shared at this time. But this little piece is my current mood. XD

[curious-cecil]

Midnight Detective Progress Report

Midnight Detective Progress Report: July 28th, 2023 •Finished first draft of prologue comic (writing) •First draft for game script started •Experimenting with pixel and general art styles •Researching game development and engines •First Concepts for some important characters 🎨: @curious-cecil

Creator Note: (@curious-cecil) Sorry for irregular posts and not many posts with new art. I have been busy with commission work as well as my busy at work. (Recently had some mandatory overtime.) I haven't had much of a chance to work on new art or finish up started pieces to a state they can be posted. I need to get better with my time management as well as get quicker with my art. 😥

[curious-cecil]

CUSTOM EMOTE COMMISSIONS

Finally finished these emote commissions for Cheese! She is a lovely Mouse Vtuber and I even helped a good bit with her design!

VTuber: CheeseTheGirl Twitter - Twitch - YouTube

Emote commission prices if interested: -Twitch Emotes- 1 for $25+ 3 for $45+ 6 for $60+ -Animated Twitch Emotes- 1 for $30+

[curious-cecil]

thinking about the scene in barbie where she asks for permission to be herself and she's told she doesn't need permission, and no one can give her permission for that, because it's just something you start doing

thinking about the scene in barbie where they say you don't need to be exceptional to have worth and deserve love, because just getting through the day is often hard enough

also thinking about the scene in barbie where barbie tells a bunch of construction workers she doesn't have a vagina and the construction workers who have no context beyond her being a pretty girl are like "oh okay that's cool"

[curious-cecil]

Going to be sharing the occasional Fungi Fact since fungi are a big inspiration for Midnight Detective. Also working on another fun little interactive thing to go along with this. ;) So look forward to that!

Fungi Fact: Did you know oyster mushrooms are carnivores? In order to obtain the nitrogen they need, oyster mushrooms secrete a powerful toxin that stuns passing microscopic nematode worms, whereupon their sprawling fibers will seek out and enter their mouths and suck out their guts! These fungi are also the ones I based Darkwood's fungi on. Though a bit bluer and spookier. Source!

[curious-cecil]

Happy Midnight folks! We are hard at work with behind the scenes things for Midnight Detective.

We will be trying to do progress reports and working on interactive stuff for posts. So, that you guys can be informed but also entertained while you wait for the comic and game!

[curious-cecil]

Will be making an update about post scheduling for Midnight Detective tomorrow. Nothing to serious just have to slow some things down. X3

Just a quick sketch concept for one of Darkwood's potential hair styles. I am trying to come up with a few styles for him for different situations.

Update on about post scheduling tomorrow. 🎨 Art: @curious-cecil

[curious-cecil]

I got a thing from my insurance today trying to say I'm going to be responsible for over $13,000 in medical bills. It's stupid, i don't understand why they don't cover the majority of it when it was literally for me getting attacked by an animal. And it's not just like it was a little thing. I was pretty much mauled. Like I've got a ton of crazy scars now from it. I need to see if I can get them to review it again and/or see if my parents' insurance will cover it since I'm on theirs too. Though they haven't sent or said anything as far as I know about it even though it's been a couple of months now. This sucks. America's healthcare system is fucking awful.

[curious-cecil]

slasher horror: you better not have premarital sex or gerald "the stabber" douglas is gonna getcha

creepypasta: once there was a teen named alex and he was bullied so hard that he and the acid disfigured him so and he started killing everyone so they call him george the attacker

/x/: there was the skinwalker who stole my best friend's voice and then man door hand hook car door

r/nosleep: my wife was hungry for raw meat and then she gave birth to The Satan. he looked me in the eyes and said "don't go outside past midnight or else the eyeless ones might notice." but it turns out i never had a wife or son and the world ended 5 years ago on this very night.

r/twosentencehorror: i ran out of bloodmilk for my cereal. luckily, the creature provides.

mascot horror: this is silly wiggles, the candy giraffe! explore the silly wiggles candy emporium after dark! the secret ingredient is Love™! also the hidden video tapes will reveal that "Love™" is actually the copyright name for the consciousness of tortured children, mixed with the ground organs of factory workers.

indie horror: i can't describe this, there are only 7 pixels so idk what's going on

[curious-cecil]

free my man he only did some of that

[curious-cecil]

Darkwood eat a snickers, you're not you when you're hungry. Orrr...in this case possessed by the fungi. 🎨Art: @curious-cecil

[curious-cecil]

This is my attempt at making Dex and Darkwood into marketable plushies-I mean chibis! I think I did really well in capturing their unique personalities and if things take off, I may even make these into stickers! 🎨Art: @curious-cecil

[curious-cecil]

SweetRyvre and I (@curious-cecil) both took a shot at designing a logo. She took a more stylized approach that incorporates the game's vibe while I focused more on the potential brand. Both are good in their own way. These are also likely not the final product.

[curious-cecil]

How to tumblr for artists… my own version

A collection of things that have been working for me, but may not work for everyone

~~~ your posts ~~~

!!!reblog your own stuff!!! you need to reblog your own stuff, there is nothing morally wrong with reblogging your own stuff regularly. in fact, it is morally right to allow the chance for more people to see your artwork.

~~~ queue it!! ~~~ my queue is 500 posts strong. maybe don't try to make your queue hundreds of posts strong in the same day omg but like… once every month or two i'll go through my whole blog and just scroll and "add to drafts" to every one of my own posts i have. then i'll use the "mass post editor" to add content warning tags. and add to queue, and shuffle. and then I write down what the date was for when I last added my posts to be reblogged on queue. this is helped by turning on timestamps for posts in tumblr "dashboard preferences" settings.

queueing is necessary and life saving for me. It takes out so much work with decision fatigue and the anxiety around posting. It also guarantees that even if I suddenly need time off or away from my phone, I don't just disappear and lose all traction. It also breaks the instant-gratification cycle that you expect when you finish an artwork. It's hard to keep creating when you post something and, when you're expecting to get that gratification, you get none... If you queue your new artwork to come out at a later time, you've separated that expectation - with time. It hurts less and contributes to a more consistent gratification thing instead of peaks and troughs.

~~~ tag ya stuff ~~~ when you're making a new post, the first 20 tags are what gets put into the searchable tags. do not feel shame for using lots of tags. shame is the mind-killer. tags are hard. hard to know what to tag a post with. hard to remember the tags. so I found some ways to help myself. maybe they'll help you too. dedicate some time towards just figuring out what tags you want to use. i have a list in my phone notes that i add tags to and reference whenever i'm making a new post. i have the phone right beside the laptop while i'm tagging so that i can just look at it and scroll. tags are the only way for people to find your artwork, other than people manually coming to your blog because they saw you somewhere. there is no algorithm. posting without tags, until you have an established fanbase, is throwing something into the void.

When I'm doing tag research, I look at what people seem to use - when you put something in the search bar, tumblr recommends you some that have a higher following, typically. Looks like this on desktop:

if you like one tag, look at what other people who use that tag also tag their posts with. Observe and learn how this tag is used. search through a bunch of them and write them down.

here's what i got in my notes, for the specific kind of art I post and look for:

these tags are sort of specific to me and the kind of art I make. You'll want to research your own tags, but this is an example of how I keep them organized to make posting more effective. I generally only write down a tag when it's got more than 2k followers. You might be tempted to use the tags with millions of followers, but I've actually found those a lot less functional for small artists. If your stuff doesn't immediately get a bunch of notifications, you're drowned out and pushed to the bottom much faster. But the bigger tags are better than no tags, so I keep them if I can't think of anything else to tag something with.

~~~ post at the right times….? ~~~

fridays and saturdays is when I post fresh new things... usually. every website has it's own peak hours, and you can find those hours in many different online articles that try to sell you social media growth services. tumblr is unique in having later hours.

here's some random graph from google images:

please don't over think this. please don't let this consume the idea of when to post, preventing you from posting at all. it doesn't mean too much - if you post during very active hours, maybe your art would just be pushed down the feed faster. if you post at the end of hours, maybe everyone's going to sleep… if you post at inactive hours, maybe there's less 'competition'… if you post at the beginning of active hours, maybe that's just more time for your post to circulate for the day, if you have enough people reblogging it once it drops....

this also is in EST. So fuck the other time zones, I guess. I'm over here in europe knowing that the "best" time to post would be like 2-3am or something. It's like this for most english-speaking majority sites - higher traffic in north american time zones.

it's also worth mentioning that this is scattered as heck, compared to other social media sites. and it's not like, the activity times of your followers. it's not the best time to post for your niche. this is just tumblr, broadly. all of tumblr.

~~~ Plan ahead for annual dates ~~~

Your artwork will get more circulation if it's posted on a celebratory day. You could just put them on your calendar and if you're wondering what to make, look on the calendar for what's coming soon. For example, asexual awareness day, trans day of visibility, location-specific holidays, etc. Here's my phone notes thing with my own recorded annuals:

I got these dates from googling and reading different articles, but I find that I still miss dates, and then I add them for next year. If you know of some I missed, tell me and I'll add them please <3

~~~ reblog other people's stuff ~~~

tumblr is sorta about ecosystems. things get passed around within groups of people that are all following eachother. to enter this ecosystem, you must engage and reblog other people's stuff too.

if you reblog other artists' stuff, sometimes they'll come over and reblog your stuff too. sometimes they'll follow you back. this is called becoming a mutual. I'll search specific tags for the kinds of people I want to follow and the kind of art I like - those are listed in the screenshot of my tag note under "Tags for finding new people".

I see a lot of blogs out there that are very clean, posts are tagless, and are only for the artists' content. like scrolling through a portfolio. I imagine this is good for people who are migrating to tumblr but already have their own established fanbase from elsewhere.

you don't need to do reblog other people's stuff on your art blog, you can do this on a separate blog. but if the two don't look very closely correlated, it's hard to tell who you are when you're interacting. and hard to make sure people know that you are the same person as your art blog. and you gotta remember to promote yourself on your personal blog.

~~~ have an art tag ~~~

make your blog easy to search!

if i go to your blog, and you've written 'artist' or 'sometimes art' in your bio, i wanna see it… it make me so sad when i don't get to see it. i want to reblog it. please let me reblog it :(

to make a tag on your own blog searchable, you don't need to repost it to add a tag. you don't even need to reblog it. you can actually just go back to the original post and edit it to add your tag. I've seen post people just have their art tag be something like #(blogname)art . you can see my own in my tags image above. if it's very unique, then it'll work tumblr-wide. I think that's good, since the tumblr search function is really weird. Otherwise it should still work if it's not entirely unique, people just have to make sure they're searching specifically your blog to see only your stuff.

I like to have a link in my pinned post where people can click to have immediately searched for my art tag. Convenience is king. Keep in mind that most people are on mobile, and if something isn't immediately clickable, they often won't find it.

~~~ be consistent and be patient ~~~

!!!this time will pass anyway!!! how many notes you have is not correlated with how good you are as an artist. wanting to earn something from your art means you essentially have two jobs. two potentially full time jobs. this shit's difficult. most of the job is promoting yourself. don't undersell how hard it is to do… don't feel bad for not immediately succeeding. I would write about how hard it's been to promote myself, but it would just be long and sad I think.

This isn't a full guide, please feel free to add more!!

I'm sure in another year I'll disagree with a lot of this, it will become irrelevant with time, and I'll have a lot of different opinions. Chip in and share what you've been doing? Teach me? This is very overwhelming. Don't do it all at once, just like, try one thing at a time, and see how it works for you. Your niche might be different. One size does not fit all. If you're confused about some of the things I talk about in here, you might be on mobile. I do most of my queueing and posting from the desktop browser version.

I will update this with more as things change, but I think you'll have to click through to see the updated post

[curious-cecil]

I love how my version came out (the one on the right). I say it's pretty good for basically a first attempt at making ana actual decent logo. It may be changed in the future, but it still works for now while we are still in the planning, concepting, and writing stages.

SweetRyvre and I (@curious-cecil) both took a shot at designing a logo. She took a more stylized approach that incorporates the game's vibe while I focused more on the potential brand. Both are good in their own way. These are also likely not the final product.

[curious-cecil]

when i die i'll wake up in a point and click escape the room game from 2007 and when i escape the room i'll wake up in regular hell, and when i solve hell's puzzles i'll wake up in my bed and spend 2 hours on my phone reading about the symptoms of mold poisoning even though i know that's not what that was

[curious-cecil]

I now offer logo commissions! Pricing starts at $20+. Pricing is dependent on complexity and the use of the logo. I take payment via PayPal or Ko-Fi! All info on my other commissions as well as other important links are pinned on my profile. Feel to message me with any questions and/or if you are interested in commissioning me! You can also message me on Discord: curiouscecil