DeviantArt

I’ve had a deviantArt account since early high school. It’s held my creative endeavors (and much of my ego) for years. It may seem a bit odd that an engineer has an online page for the express purpose of sharing their creativity but it’s really not all that uncommon. I think every human being of my generation was at least tempted to create one during their adolescence. Most of us did, if for no other reason than someone else said they should.

I’ve also always been a huge dork and a lot of my drawings were of D&D characters, anime/manga-inspired flights of fancy, more D&D characters… Occasionally I drew other fantasy creatures or pencil sketches of random crap when I was in the mood.

All this isn’t really important though. I recently took down all of my “stuff” from DA because there was no way to delete the account and I was tired of having so many pages on the grid. I backed everything up, of course, and decided later to re-upload my favorites and try to contribute something new every once in a while. I still want to try to be creative, after all.

Interestingly enough, all my data was lost in a terrible fiasco and I was left with nothing to immediately upload. A couple of days ago, however, I embarked on what front-desk guru Ron called therapy (and what I called spontaneous.) It’s viewable on my deviantArt account.

The whole point of this post is coming up, I swear.

And here it is: the upload process. Uploading work to DA used to be the most teeth-pulling experience on the internet, aside from the bandwidth limitations on the Virginia Tech network. It was a multi-step process that could fail at any moment, requiring you to start all over again. Now, they have some flash thingy that’s right around thirty times easier to use.

Back in the day, there was a lot of controversy about copyrights and DA. People weren’t sure about their rights to their own material and art thieves were (and are still) running rampant. Most users were nervous about the DA Terms of Service. Did the company reserve the right to reproduce your work? Horror! It’s hard to decode that stuff.

This time, when I uploaded, I was given the option of attaching a Creative Commons license to my art, which is pretty cool!