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This post is bitter-sweet & I've been struggling to articulate my thoughts into words. However I feel the dA community should know. It is with a heavy heart that the dA community lost one of our own Jillian Durgin, sometimes freelance model & founder of Ritual Fashion, here on dA she was known as "JillianAnn999." She was in a tragic car accident outside her home in Rome, GA on 26 Aug, 2023. When I first heard the news, I didn't believe it. I knew she was going throughthe usual BS most public personalities have with online a**holes so I called her number & left a voicemail asking her to call me, hoping what I'd heard was a different Jillian. Came inside, Googled her name while I waited, & was devastated to read the first entry was an outside news report of the car accident. This was later confirmed when her family & company's Instagram spread the same news. The news link is here: https://www.wrganews.com/2023/08/26/rome-man-killed-in-chattooga-county-wreck/ Here's the rememberance

Happy New Year everyone! May your 2024 be better than 2023. I'm normally reluctant to have people use my work used as reference or stock material because in all honesty, I view my work as a finished product. Its an intrepretation of my vision. Even when looking at samples of a prospective artist's work, its kinda a mystery as to how my finished product will look once its filtered through their prism. - Will it be trashy? - Will there be actual effort put into it? (Sorry but a crop job & playing w/ the colors doesn't cut it)? - Will they publicly credit me as their source material? - Will the finished product be demeaning to my subjects? - Will they even notify me when its done? Its always a crapshoot. Don't even get me started on my objections to AI art. You're welcome to read my feelings about it here. So long as the prospective artist asks beforehand (instead of just assuming I've already given permission), I'm likely to approve such request. Fellow deviant Wytherwing recently

Just say no to AI "art." We artist are ALREADY undervalued, underappreciated, & underpayed. To say nothing about our work routinely being stolen. How does that effect the dA experience? Each time I open a lovely piece to comment, I view the keywords & if it has "AI" or something like that. I immediately move on. The more I move on & not find what I'm hoping for, the more difficult it is to find worthwhile artists who are *gasp* actually human! Let's be real. Me complimenting a computer program isn't going to inspire them. Making a suggestionin isn't going to improve something either their approach or subject matter or view it in a different way. Schmucks like me who've been around the block aren't the ones effected by dA's acceptance & promotion of AI art. Its the budding "human" artists who are effected because they have to deal with being amongst the riff-raff. On the upside dA is giving us the avility to block keywords & a checkbox that specifically "Mutes AI Art" in the