Kristen's Master Feature List

3-9-2017       This became too long for a status message so I'll stick it here.  I have spent the last three months racking my brain to come up with a new title for my next illustration feature series. They've always been in essence the same: works I admire and favorite, with different angles taken via certain groupings (such as long features with lots of writing gushing over a certain artist, alphabetical listings from a massive list that I kept on paper, grab bag features with little tidbits recently uploaded or found, the result of years of bookmarking illustrators posted as The Attic series with a charming story at the beginning, etc. etc.). Collections of my favorites or otherwise, there are a few reasons to create series: 

♥ They spice things up, so you don't get Illustrations Volume MMXVII. Unless you're into that. I'm not. I can't count that high.

♥ You get feature name recognition; "Oh that's so-and-so's feature! I will take time out of my daily life to view this."

♥ They're just fun to add to, I guess. The bulk of features I see are being run in various series. And it means you don't have to come up with random names every week.

        Anyway, I believe I've finally come up with a name. I have been going through my earliest DA illustrator bookmarks, of which there are hundreds (going back to 2013), and to my horror, a lot of these people are no longer on the site. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly not a surprise; time moves on, and people with it, but it deeply saddens me that I won't get to see any more art from these people. And there's another problem: adding a 2013 photo to a photography feature is a little different than featuring a ton of artwork from, say, 2010-2015 from a person who hasn't been online in 70 weeks. I didn't used to care, I admit. Not at all. Art was art, and it was beautiful and I shared it anyway. But now I see people's point; from a feature standpoint, viewers like to look at recent-ish work, and while I'll still be going back through artist's oldest work and probably featuring a lot of that, I am deleting many of the bookmarks of people who simply aren't around anymore. :< The hindsight hurts. There are a lot of people that I could have featured last year who were active, who aren't now. It was with that line of thinking: past, present, and future, that I came up with the name The Time Machine.
        My bookmarks act as a sort of time capsule, except that in the best case scenarios, the artists haven't archived their accounts, they're continuing to add to them into 2017. While I can't really go back in time, I can still delve into past artwork and share some of that, while appreciating what the artists are putting out in the present, and looking towards the future. Who knows, maybe some of those who left may come back someday.
        I'm not quite sure how to go about the series. There are many types of deviants accounted for in the bookmarks, and I'm not sure what cutoff dates I should have in terms of "recent" art. I didn't care much about that when doing The Attic, though nearly everyone was active. At the very least, I have some sense of direction, and quite importantly, a name!