Goin' Mobile
I left DeviantArt three years ago at a crossroads in my artistic journey. What I have posted here is most of the highlights of my digital SLR photography from the years of 2008-2019. Since then, I have transitioned to shooting almost exclusively with a mobile phone. Initially taking on an informal "sexting" style, with advances in technology, these photos now rival the quality of anything I shoot, while the convenience and portability enable me to get creative more easily in more locations.
Which is why I am now considering sharing some of the fruits of my creative endeavors over the last several years here on DeviantArt. I've spent a good deal of time sharing highlights on the website now formerly known as Twitter, but I'm growing disillusioned with the superficial nature of social media, where my posts are hamstrung by shadow-banning algorithms. I find myself missing the community atmosphere of the old photo gallery format.
When I left Flickr about ten years ago and set out into the wilderness of the world wide web, my goal was to decentralize my art from a single platform, and spread my brand across the online landscape, while familiarizing myself with new websites, and gathering followers as I went. DeviantArt was the first place I landed, but it wasn't meant to be the last.
I tried Tumblr, and FetLife, and eventually navigated to Twitter. In Patreon, I discovered a way to finally monetize my decade-long hobby - until they penalized me for unrelated self-promotion on an unaffiliated website. OnlyFans has been more welcoming, with its permissive attitude toward sexual expression, but technical difficulties recently inspired me to start a parallel account on JustForFans.
Being a nude artist on the internet, every step forward is accompanied by two steps backwards. As I explore new platforms, I find more doors closing behind me than I see opening in front of me. Rather than spreading my brand, I feel like I'm being coralled into a corner, especially with all these anti-sex work bills threatening to catalog perverts and outlaw our freedom of expression.
Tumblr has famously banned nudity. Patreon discriminated against me for my identity as a pornographer, even though I followed their rules to the letter. I even tried posting squeaky clean images on Instagram, and they still found a reason to suspend my account (that one's a head scratcher). OnlyFans almost banned porn, but backtracked at the last minute. Even Blogger threatened censorship before caving to consumer backlash. In a press release riddled with doublespeak (as they always are), Flickr's new owners announced that their most profitable customers - the erotic artists, who drive the majority of web traffic - would now have to pay to use the service. I deleted my account in protest, reluctantly wiping out years of my own artistic history. And they say nothing ever disappears from the internet...
And now, one of the last bastions for free speech on the internet - the website formerly known as Twitter - is being run into the ground by an adolescent troll who happens to be a billionaire. I feel targeted and persecuted, my voice silenced at every turn. And I find myself reminiscing about the days when sharing nude photography on the internet was simpler, and the predominant fear was whether people would like it, not whether the door would be slammed in my face.
I have my complaints about DeviantArt, but the longer they hold out on pivoting from old school photo sharing to becoming another social media clone like so many others out there, the more appealing they look. It's ironic, but I get more community engagement here than on any self-described "social networking" site. And although this site does not allow sexually explicit media (at least ostensibly), there is an unmistakable undercurrent of fetishism that I appreciate. So I think I'm gonna spend some more time here before this artists' resource is gone, too.
But you might have to give me some time to get my affairs in order first - I've been shooting faster than I can process my images, and my art is in complete disarray at the moment. And I hate disorganization. In the meantime, you can view highlights of the sort of things you can expect to see by browsing my Twitter feed. Or, spend a measly $5 on one of my subscription sites and get a month's access to everything, including full motion erotic videos. The choice is yours.
Introducing... Fashion Dolls
Well, I've now come across something else I'd like to share. It's a series of paper "fashion dolls" that I bought and used to draw out various fashions to delight my mind's eye. These ones were created later in life, but this is something I actually used to do way back when I was a child.
Being a fan of Tomb Raider, there came within the box for the second or third game in the series a cardboard cut-out of Lara Croft. I traced this cut-out multiple times on paper, and proceeded to draw several different fashions within the blank outline. I even liked to name them.
In hindsight, this interest in women's fashion is rather telling, but at the time, I had no trouble justifying it in my mind as an extension of my attraction to women, much the way that I enjoyed watching Sailor Moon because I thought the girls in it were cute (although I was careful to keep my interest in the show a secret at the time, lest I be teased for liking "a girls' show").
In the intervening years since those days, I have had a phase in which I liked to use eLouai's Candybar Doll Maker to create many different girls with different fashion styles that appealed to me. I believe this is an extension of my related desire to dress up a mannequin (in lieu of having models at my disposal to dress up per my instructions), a desire that I have since largely transposed onto myself in spite of the remaining limitations of my anatomy.
In any case, I found a fashion doll book at one point, and started drawing in it a variety of fashions that I would love now to share with you.
#DeviantArtistQuestionnaire
According to my profile, I started this account 10 years ago, but it wasn't until six years ago that I migrated here from Flickr and started sharing my art in earnest.
2. What does your username mean?
It's a name I invented for a character in a one-off story I wrote in junior high school. The story was forgettable, but the name stuck. It's not from any one particular language, but I like to think of it as my "soul signature". Translated into English, it means "between".
3. Describe yourself in three words.
Naked, sexy, girly - which covers the three prongs of my artistic output, and what I recently decided should be my Twitter handle (since "zharth" was, unbelievably, taken).
4. Are you left or right handed?
I write left-handed. But I do most other things right-handed.
5. What was your first deviation?
According to my gallery (I may have done some cleaning up at some point), it was a self-portrait titled Facing the Darkness, from my 365 Daily Nudes project (originally on Flickr) that really launched my passion for nude photography.
6. What is your favourite type of art to create?
Nude self-portrait photography. Whether it's innocent and nudist-oriented, or suggestively erotic; I can go either way.
7. If you could instantly master a different art style, what would it be?
Drawing. So I could bring images in my head to life that are impossible for me to stage in reality, using real people (i.e., for a photoshoot).
8. What was your first favourite?
Again, according to my profile, it was a sepia-tinted artistic nude by YuriBonder.
9. What type of art do you tend to favourite the most?
Artistic photos of nude (or scantily dressed) women, clearly. Occasionally drawings and paintings that I really like. Anything girly.
10. Who is your all-time favourite deviant artist?
I really don't have a favorite. I tend to be attracted to specific works, rather than particular artists. There are a few I follow because their gallery has a certain consistency, and I want to see what they'll come up with next. But I spend more time here on my own gallery, posting art and responding to notes and comments. In fact, most art I discover on this site is through looking at the favorites pages of other deviants who have favorited my art. (Call me narcissistic, but I like to see how my art looks posted up alongside other art). Although a lot of them have different tastes to what I like (e.g., men instead of women, or a high level of fetish content), I occasionally get a pleasant surprise.
11. If you could meet anyone on DeviantArt in person, who would it be?
Honestly, I don't have anyone in mind, but I suppose it would either be a photographer I respected who wanted to photograph me, or a model I liked who wanted to pose for or with me. The truth is, I'm pretty reclusive. I've worked for years getting comfortable interacting with people online. I'm happy to have the fans and followers I do, but I'm also comfortable keeping a computer between us.
12. How has a fellow deviant impacted your life?
If it wasn't for KittenChomp paving the way, I probably wouldn't even know about Patreon, and I definitely wouldn't have given it a try.
13. What are your preferred tools to create art?
These days, my iPhone (although I really need to get a new camera). And my imagination, of course. And all the art I see online that inspires me.
14. What is the most inspirational place for you to create art?
Lately? In my back yard, I guess; because it's close and convenient, and being outdoors inspires me to capture the beauty of being naked in nature.
15. What is your favourite DeviantArt memory?
When a certain deviant who refused to shoot nudes told me she was going to try shooting nudes, after being inspired by the art I create.
Fall Cleaning
Well, you may have heard that Flickr was recently bought out by SmugMug, and among other changes, they've been working on overhauling the login process. So I finally broke down and emailed support, and have been able to get back into my old Flickr account! Worry not, for I am not leaving deviantART. But I wouldn't mind having a presence on both sites, especially considering Flickr's more liberal stance on erotic art. However, another one of the changes SmugMug has made to the site is to limit free accounts to 1,000 photos (I have well over three times that many).
So, until such time as I decide it's a worthwhile investment to subscribe to this site I haven't even used in the last six years - and I'd been planning on trimming down for a long time, anyway - I'm going to have to pare down my photostream significantly, as I can't upload any new material until I'm back under the 1,000 photo limit (and I'm rather curious what the Flickr community would think of some of my newer images). I've already begun going through deleting photos that I feel don't live up to my current standard of artistry (starting with the images that aren't self-portraits, since that's what I'm known for), but it's painful eliminating such a large part of my developmental history, along with all the faves and comments I've racked up over the years.
What you can, perhaps, do to help me is visit my Flickr photostream, stroll through my thousands of photos (many of which are soon no longer going to be readily available), and fave or leave comments on the ones you really like (note: you'll have to have an account and disable SafeSearch to see the majority of them). I'll probably keep the ones that are the most popular (although I can't make promises on any particular images), because honestly, how can you eliminate a photo with over a hundred thousand views, hundreds of faves, and dozens of comments? I don't know what kind of deadline there is for this (the site has been claiming for a while that they're going to start deleting things themselves), but it's going to take me a long time to sift through all this stuff.
So consider this a fun project for when you're bored stiff, and sitting in front of a computer. (Although it's probably best not to do this while at work... -_-
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Correspondence Item
I don't know if it was some primitive AI, but whoever incorrectly flagged my photo House Corner as potentially containing "explicit content" ought to get a clue (and check out the hundreds of other images of graphic nudity I have in my gallery that are permitted on deviantART). The photo has a curiously large number of views for only being up for a week and a half (and not having been added to any groups), so I'm wondering if maybe it was linked somewhere to a potentially conservative audience.
I would love to address anybody's concerns and have an open dialogue about art and nudity and "explicit content" - shots in the dark like this one are immature and, moreover, completely ineffective when you don't understand the rules and you're up against somebody who does. There are plenty of images on deviantART for which you could make a better case (whether successful or not) for containing "explicit content" than this one. But no matter, this ineffectual warning is easily ignored (I only bring it up so I can use it as an educational opportunity).
Note to staff: your use of the term "explicit content" here is problematic, given that it is easily confused with "mature content" (surely that is not what you meant, as the deviation in question already contains a mature content filter, as it was added to the Artistic Nude category for which such a filter is mandatory and automatically added by your software), and that phrase is not actually used in the policy guide it links to which denotes the types of "pornographic" material that is not permitted on deviantART (the word "explicit" occurs only three times in that document, and twice in reference to nudity which is allowed behind a content filter). Please, clarity in this matter is very important.