starakex

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Gooooo Artfight! I'm participating again this year! My profile is over there. I've gotten new brushes on CSP in the last couple of months that really upped my motivation to draw, so I'm looking forward to this year! Added a couple new faces to the list and trimmed some old OCs I didn't feel strongly about. Now that I had a year to marinate those, I feel a lot more confident in this year's roster! (Last year's participation was so last minute that basically every OC except Bibo were scrounged up in a hurry within a couple hours LMAO) I'm gonna be batting for Team Crystal this year. It's what Jack woulda wanted.

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(Photo taken by DarklingDragon)

Went to a furmeet last weekend. Had a great time! I kind of felt out of place since I only really interact with the furry community at large like twice a year for those meetups, which I knoooow doesn't make me a fraud and I'm comfortable being furry-adjacent, but the brain is a tricky thing. I guess it's always a culture shock meeting people who feel a strong identity aspect to the fandom while I'm just piddling around for the costuming aspect! Nevertheless, I always enjoy a good excuse to pull a costume out. This was Nullref's official event debut, and she held up great! Her mouth provides great ventilation despite having no fans installed and it's always a hoot to smash my face through to have perfect vision without having to take it off. I've learned I hate wearing handpaws even when I attach the liner properly though, so oops.

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Still going through the accumulated OCs from the sketchbook to pick out the standout ones to add to AF this year and draw them a digital ref. This one's a concentrated beam of all the nostalgic feelings I get when the weather gets warm every year. Bright and bubbly, reminiscent of humid sunsets, lounging in the sand, and chunky early 3d game graphics. Basically Sonic Adventure's hotel pool as a character lmao

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Oh Bibo mon Bibo

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This came to me in a vision and has haunted me ever since

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peekaboo!

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Your face will get stuck like that boy

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More Artfight ref sheet banging out! Here's Scratch, my Sonic OC. The universe is a saw trap and he keeps tumbling into the horrors and coming out the other side (relatively) unscathed

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Decided to finally explore the stick that has been in his habitat for years

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Sweeping the cobwebs off my art tablet and starting to scrounge up some updated refs for this year's Artfight. I finally jotted down something I'm happy with for Nullref! (the meat poncho always stuck out like a sore thumb to me)

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I've ordered my first batch of die-cut stickers! It's super humbling to have my digital art in physical form... Planning to give 'em out at the next furmeet while wearing Nullref!

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New lil project underway! Fur is absolutely hell to get right now (I'll never forgive most of the good fur suppliers being based in the USA 😭), so I'm stash busting my fleece pile and making a Shadow Kigurumi for those moments where a costume is fun but actually wearing one is too much effort. So far I've got the main body done, and I'm attaching the back quills and tail this week before moving on to the chest tuft. (or maybe the hood first?) Got to do some appliqués again with the red stripes, so that's fun!

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Retinal Screen Burn

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Y'all don't know how HAPPY I am it's finally over 10°C outside. My arms are absorbing sunlight at long last...

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Neocities Website Launch!

Between the projected unknown future death of this here website and my absolute dread at losing the history built on this blog (and, well, the dread of also having to start over on another, shitter Social Media Platform full of "Whimsical" Ads and "Helpful" Algorithms), I just spent the last two weeks building a website over on Neocities! You can find what is essentially an archive of all the crafts I've made since I started cosplaying in 2010 over at starakex.neocities.org. (There's a lot of costumes on it that never had a proper coverage on this blog!)

Going back on an HTML journey was kind of healing, to be honest, even if I'm rusty as all shit. I've spent a lot of time on modern internet platforms and even if I avoided a lot of the worse offenders... I still kind of lost my human touch. I don't want to think of the bits I post about myself online as "content", anymore. We're not meant to be consumed in a chain. I'm still adding to the neocities website; I've got a very empty blog section to futureproof my ability to yap online, a couple unrelated pages that aren't just costumes and stuff, and I'm hoping to add a page with some of my OCs in the future. But it's currently in a solid v1.0 with all craft projects covered alongside some photography and collecting hobby stuff! I love being able to keep a complete backup of the site locally, so if Neocities croaks I can just... Take everything and host somewhere else. It makes me feel safer, to have a slew of options. As for the social media part, well, I intend to stick around here until the website explodes. If it comes down to it, I'll probably open an account somewhere else on one of the least hostile options. Nothing's jumped at me yet as the right candidate; Tumblr's got that crumb of user-experience control nobody else has matched in a long while. I love seeing posts exclusively from my follow-list, the chronological feed, the tag blacklisting, how human interactions between users are, and the trove of browser extensions to customize as needed... As grumpy as I am about modern web though, I still enjoy interacting with people on the internet, so I'll try to compromise on a good-ish platform in the event of hellsite death. Hope you enjoy the website! It's been fun to go back through my costuming journey while making it.

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It's Majora's Mask's anniversary today! I love that game so damn much... 25 years later and I'm still just as obsessed lol

Photo by sps.cosplay.photography on IG