a few new updates today!! updated suwa's galleries and changed the home page up a smidge to include a gif of the new vtuber model i illustrated and rigged for him hehe. i decided last month to stop letting my dreams be dreams and finally just commit to making a vtuber model from scratch by myself even if it came out like shit or if i gave up. thankfully i didn't and i'm genuinely really proud of what i was able to do for my first time using live2d. had a lot of struggle thanks to an early mistake that i didn't realize was a mistake and didn't have consequences until way down the line but! i managed to figure it out in the end. this tutorial series by merely wufeii was a godsend and i highly highly recommend it if you intend to learn how to rig a model. i finished the rigging with 36 days left of my free live2d trial thanks to this which meant i didn't have to spend a cent!! definitely cheaper to DIY than to commission a model artist and rigger lmfao.
i also finally got around to utilizing the new organization system i set up back on the 10th to add a character directory and a page for one of my other OCs, kouga!! i figured it was about time to add him here since i draw ship art of him with suwa often enough that it only made sense. and now that i have a character directory set up, i should be able to add even more characters in the future should i ever decide that i want to!
i think a project for another time will probably be to make another sub gallery on each of their pages for gifted and commissioned art, because i'd really like to show off the art i've gotten from others as well!! for now though, i think i'll probably call it a day. but my OC brainrot is particularly strong at the moment so more updates and art may be incoming sooner rather than later. guess we'll see!
new upload in the bone zone B) also long time no update on account of i spent most of my free time working on commissions back in august because i'd been dealing with mad sciatic pain and went to the doctor to get my shit fixed and turns out i have lumbar degeneration at age 30. so. emergency commissions to pay for the visit and x-rays and a new chair so that i have better lumbar support when i'm drawing lmfao. the chair's been working wonders and i don't have to deal with sciatic pain much anymore thankfully, but now i do feel the pain in my back quite a bit more orz. regardless though!! my commissions are done and so i'm taking at least the rest of the month to focus on personal stuff.
although... uhhhh i kinda fell headfirst back into oshikatsu stuff. rip. so now i'm trying to juggle both oc brainworms and vtuber brainworms at the same time lmfao. but hey on the bright side i made this cool-ass turnaround gif from a bunch of my suha fanart over the last year or so!! i'd been wanting to make one of these for ages but my style hasn't ever been consistent enough until recently. i'm so happy i could finally do it TToTT
added a guestbook (and in the process figured out how to edit the links sidebar without destroying the formatting lmfao)
somehow i always manage to write these before i've actually finished updating things to my liking for the day ^^;;
so not only did i go back and add subfolders as stated, i also added a subfolder for site buttons and went a little ham decorating with them on the home page!! i also figured out how to get youtube embeds working so naturally i had to embed my favorite suha karaoke stream lmfao
and then i got to thinking "hm.... i sure wish i had music for my site" but i ran. into a bit of a dilemma. you see i initially wanted to do just a button with an embedded playlist, but i didn't really wanna just steal an artist's work to promote my own in that way. so then i was like. okay, youtube embed. which i tried at first using a button because i didn't really need the video player, but i couldn't get it working at all... so then i decided to try a playlist embed, but youtube's embed code uses an iframe and when i tried to add it to the index page it was putting the links and resources page there instead?? i still have no clue why lmfao but! i found a code to let me embed it without an iframe and now i have a working playlist in the corner that doesn't stop when you navigate from page to page and will update if i decide to add more music in the future. i'm genuinely so proud that i managed to figure this out you have no idea how embarrassingly long that took.
i also updated some of the overall language on a few of the pages, and finally i changed the table on the first page to reflect my personal links because i couldn't think of anything else i would want to put there lol. wow. i've been doing this for like 8 hours now. time to collapse now!
long time no update! took a break from the site for about a month because of personal reasons (been dealing with a lotta sciatic pain that makes sitting for long periods of time difficult; turns out my spine is disintegrating a lil earlier than most on account of my shit posture lol). but now that i've had some time away and have drawn some more suwas, i figured it was time to come back and update again! so i added my newest suwa arts of course, but also. i spent some time reorganizing things to make futureproofing easier. meaning: i added folders so that things will be way easier to find as i move forward and add more to the site. figured it would be wise to do that now while there are still relatively few images and assets on here.
that's probably the biggest drawback of making your own website i guess... you do have to think forwards unless you wanna cause problems for yourself later down the line, but thinking forwards and preparing for the future is hard when you don't have any experience. something as simple as just adding folders for organizing behind the scenes, where someone visiting won't even know or see the difference unless they were paying attention to direct image URLs, took like over an hour of going back and adding the file paths to all of the code orz
but as much of a pain as it is, it's nice to learn and the pain is worth it for the sake of something i'm doing out of passion. plus while i was in there i decided to future-proof in other ways, like reorganizing the galleries to sort from newest to oldest and adding completion dates to each of the images. now returning visitors (me lol) can see my newest art first without having to scroll all the way down, and i think the dates help show the progression of the time spent developing a little bit more clearly.
in fact, as i'm writing this i think i may go back and add subfolders to my art gallery to distinguish between seiso and unseiso art, and maybe even put everything under another folder labelled suwa just in case i wanna make pages for other OCs someday... hmm....
back at it again at krispy kreme dude. spent some time making a site button this morning! (tiny little floating pixel suwa head my beloved...) i also changed up the backgrounds for each of the different boxes on the index page; not sure why, but my changes aren't visible via my desktop browser yet even though they're showing up just fine on mobile. so i'm assuming it's not a coding mistake and is some other nebulous issue i haven't figured out yet. and finally i added expandable details sections to the suwa containment area just to make it feel a bit less overwhelming. :')
but more importantly!!!! i nabbed a custom domain and bit the bullet to pay for a neocities supporter subscription hehe... goodbye swaginald.neocities.org hello suwa.channel!!! i was gonna grab suwa.art but.... it turns out .art domains are expensive as hell lol. but this one was only $7 for the year with a $7 renewal fee next year and it reminds me of vtuber channel names so i'm like, cool that's familiar and cute and comfy i'll take it! .ink was also an option but i think that would have felt more right to me if i were a tradional artist.
i still have things i'd like to do like filling out my links page a bit less hastily and also figuring out what i should put on the home page, but for now i'll slow my roll a bit and make edits in smaller chunks. the suwa stuff is what's most important to me, and i think i've got it mostly how i'd like it for the time being!
ok even more edits; i kind of got on a roll i think!! added a visitor counter, filled out all of the suwainfo and uploaded all of his gallery thus far, added and filled out an nsfw section, figured out how to make links within the iframe open in another window, made the formatting from page to page a bit more consistent, and added a page title and favicon! had a bit of a scare when i saw that all of the kanji in his name were broken up until i learned that i needed to specify the use of utc-8 for his bio section in order for them to show up properly lmfao. but i'm proud of myself for figuring out how to fix that and for everything else i've completed so far. this has definitely been much less scary to work on than i feared!
wow okay more edits already! i found a very very easy free-to-use responsive gallery code so i added that to the suwa containment area, and i also figured out how to change the iframe border color and remove the main border so that the double border effect that had been bothering me went away lol. i also changed the size of the marquee text to fit better! currently just adding more personalized flavor and preparing to fill out more suwa info.
hi i am learning to code currently wow so cool and awesome yippee