Art, The Smiley Tribute, what I've been up to

Hi guys! We've finally had a chance to restart our medication, which is doing a hell of a job motivating us to do things. I'm actually writing a Portfiend update for goodness' sake.

Here are some things that have been relevant to my life recently.

RELATED ARTICLE: Roblox, and "Authentic Fun", a really long article where I get to be normal about Roblox games for a second. This has been the bulk of my last two months.

Recent illustrations

Recently we've been getting the motivation to draw again! I didn't like how the way I colored things looked for a while, and I kind of wanted to break from my usual style of things, so I decided to pick up a textured paint-esque brush and stare at other people's art to understand how they get satisfying colors. I've been liking my art more recently as a result!

System member icons

These icons are also on the freshly-updated About Page!

Character full-bodies

I made some full-body drawings for characters that needed one. Check out our character information website if you haven't already!

(You can also reblog these on Tumblr, if you'd like.)

Unfinished character painting

Here is an unfinished painting of my friend's character. This was my first experiment with the painterly brush. I didn't finish this because I had already been drawing for four hours by the time I hit this point and I get exhausted easily, but maybe one day I will finish this? Maybe? (Probably not.......)

Wikimedia Commons and The Smiley Tribute

Lately I've developed a hobby for browsing Wikimedia Commons. For context, this is the Creative Commons-licensed media library that Wikipedia uses for all of its articles. I find it's pretty good for finding free-to-use-and-edit images and assets (especially emojis and icons), and "neutral" (basically, wiki-able) images of ordinary things. Huge news for the kind of person who gets very excited to look at pictures of geometric shapes and bathroom signs.

Come to think of it, I think I first started "browsing" WC back in 2019, when I used to make emoji edits. A lot of emoji sets have their vectors reposted to WC, especially your favorite Google emoji sets with the blobs and cute animals and whatnot.

I've been browsing a certain category on WC for SVG happy smilies lately. Something I noticed - some of the smileys in this page and adjacent categories come from icon sets, and these icon sets are a gold mine of a certain aesthetic that has gotten very popular in recent years related to computer graphic design between 2004 and 2013.

In fact, some very iconic (lol) sets that you don't know the name of are in this category - check out Silk Icons, do these remind you of anything? (Some of these icons used to be in Roblox Studio!) How about these flags by the same guy?

Anyways, I'm not sure if you're noticing, but I have a bit of a passion for icon and emoticon design. Over the years I've certainly collected some incredibly useful links to icon sets, but I don't have a place to put them! So, you guessed it, I'm considering making a small website for hosting information about emoticon and icon sets.

While I've talked about icon sets primarily, I have a much deeper interest in emoticons. Emoticons are distinctive from emoji - emoticons are usually proprietary and made for a specific website or platform, while emoji is a standard of unicode that is meant to be relatively consistent in its subjects and representation. Emoji are cool, but on account of being "general purpose", generally maintained to modern design standards, fairly recent, and often professionally designed, it misses out on the unique quirks of emoticon sets which may be more amateurish or have a particular "theme" to it. Take this green alien emoji set by LadyOfHats, for example! Remember those DeviantArt "plz" icons? Remember xat.com?

This hypothetical website I may or may not make is tentatively being called "The Smiley Tribute" right now, and primarily dedicated to the archival, appreciation, and sharing of emoticons and emoticon sets, with emoji and icon sets included as well.

In particular I really like this generic smiley face and I want to collect pictures of him

I'm not including a preview image of The Smiley Tribute because it is like, very Nothing right now, and I don't even know if I can commit to it. But I like the idea!

Special Thanks

let me copy this from the other article real quick lol

Thank you to my friends over at Eggware.XYZ, specifically the IHATEART community, for listening to me talk about Roblox games ALL OF THIS for countless hours.

My friend Mortis has been doing some blogging-type posting on their own forums, which, combined with me making a personal Tumblr for my random thoughts in text post form, has been giving me the motivation to blog again. Go check out Mortis's works, many of which can be found on the Homebrew Deviants website!

Gee, I thought I had more to write here, but apparently all of my time has been absorbed by Roblox. Imagine that.

-Desmond and the rest of Portfiend