Instead of going back in time with an image, I'm going back in time with a practice, which I uncovered while scanning all these sketchbooks: when convention season came 'round, I would try to finish a bunch of artwork to have new things to hang at the shows! And it created such delightful clusters of lovely work that I decided: well, hey, it's convention season again, I should do this thing!

I have been hard at work on the gallery and it’s time, thus, for an update! And I’m going to do it in stats because everyone loves numbers.

Overall:

• 56% of the large format books are done

• 5805 images in the gallery

• 1897 (33%) have my commentary
  169 are finished pieces!

When I say “large format”, I mean the numbered sketchbooks that are 9x12 or larger. This total doesn’t count the mini-sketchbooks, high school sketchbooks, the remaining conlang notebooks (about 72 more books) or any of the loose artwork. But I figure I’ll jump those bridges when I get to them.

Now, some fun stats:

Top Characters So Far:

• Me (!) – 267

• Alysha – 191

• Zafiil – 104

• Vasiht’h – 99

• Distant Song – 83

This probably reflects which books I’ve done so far more than popularity; I’ve done the “back” of the stack and the beginning of the stack but we’re missing large swathes of the middle. I’m curious to see how the character ratios change then… I’m guessing Alysha will remain popular but other characters will start pulling ahead.

Top settings (unsurprisingly):

• Peltedverse: 1821

• After this, Kherishdar and Jokka are tied if you count the language work for both.

Surprisingly, 168 pictures from World of Warcraft! So if you’re a gamer, you might want to hit that tag. Fun dark horse: Coracle, with 47 images uploaded so far. Only one book for Coracle, and yet!

Related: Spoiler images, at 53 uploads, comprise .9% of the total in the database right now. This is a good time to mention that when you create an account, all the warning tags are flagged by default so you don’t see those images; you have to manually uncheck them to see spoilers, questionable images, etc. I am here to protect you from accidental book trauma!

• 194 titles say some form of ‘Probably’, ‘Maybe,’ or ‘I guess’

…which reflects that a lot of these books are decades old and my paper sieve memory does not resurrect my thought process at the time, especially with really loose sketches. Which brings me to:

Notes versus Sketches (and other developmental work):

• Drawings: 93%

• Notes: 1.5%

• Language Notes: 3.8%

• Maps, Floor plans, and Schematics: 72 images

Notes can be anything from timelines to worldbuilding scribbles to poetry to outlines! More of this resides in the mini-sketchbooks than the larger ones, but it’s fun to see the data I felt I needed a bigger page to explore. Also, it’s fun to see how much time I spend on maps and schematics. If you were ever curious about what items look like, or wanted to “walk through” a floor plan of some place I’ve written about more than once, you can definitely hit the database for that. (So can I! Very important!)

Finally, a ridiculous statistic:

• 99 pages are sketches of horses

• Absolute failures (10)

• Sketches I liked (5)

• Neutral: 84

I will continue drawing horses until morale improves. Someone else’s, because apparently I am almost never happy with my horse drawings.

When I sit back and think about the fact that I’m about halfway through archiving my art and it’s nearly 6000 images already… how… how many single people have 6000 useful images online in one place? What I’m doing is wild if I look at it too closely. So I don’t, I’m just gonna keep going. XD

Go make an account and have fun browsing!

I have a gallery again.

It would be so easy to say ‘I can’t tell you what that means to me’ but part of my thing is that I do tell you what things mean to me, all the time, so I’m going to try.

mcahogarth.org

Let me start by telling you about the original Stardancer gallery, which many of you remember and an even larger number of you weren’t around for. Because in an era before big sites like DeviantArt, when personal websites were still linked by webrings and coded by hand, I had a website that used a database to show visitors not only the latest thing I’d uploaded, but the comments left by dozens of people on that offering.

It’s so hard to explain how crazy that was. There were no Wordpress packages, no visual editors, no gallery plugins. There was no user validation by Google or Apple, no social media, no expectation of interaction or community. Everything had to be coded by hand and installed by someone who wasn’t afraid of a UNIX command line. And from 1999 until mid-2012, the Stardancer gallery served, on average, 5 pieces of art a week, with over 175,000 words of commentary from me, for thirteen years, and those pieces accrued between 5 to 40 comments from visitors. When it finally went down, there were 2906 distinct pieces of art in the database, and of those 253 had multiple versions—I uploaded them as I worked on them with commentary on each stage. Some of those pieces had 9-10+ stages where you could watch me wrestling with them (complete with titles like “OMG Ugly Stage” and “needs a background”).

For context, 175,000 words is probably about 700 tightly-packed paperback pages. That’s how much commentary I wrote. And that’s not including 1993 keywords and 60 projects I was tagging everything with.

I wanted that gallery so I could share my art with all of you. But it was also functioning as an organizational layer for me. When I was trying to remember a story, a character name, a forgotten piece of art I wanted to finish, I would search my own gallery. It was my backup brain, and my sketchbook index, and it kept me focused. It even had basic project management tools, since each of those 60 projects had a status: complete, in progress, ongoing, on hold, trunked.

The sunsetting of the original site was inevitable. You can’t run software with visions of enterprise-level functionality on a friend’s personal computer. But I was in the very unusual position of having started out with a system custom-built for my idiosyncrasies, and nothing on the market was good enough. I kept poking and not loving any of my choices. Host all my artwork on some aggregate gallery site or shoehorn it into a cookie-cutter Content Management System? No thank you. So I never replaced Stardancer, and for fourteen years, I’ve been running without that second-brain infrastructure.

And now, I have it again.

Now I can think ‘what was that thing I said about that one character in that one sketchbook?’ and search and find it. I can mutter, “Where is all the Ai-Naidari language work” and pull up the notebook. I can think ‘Didn’t I want to finish that picture of the dala fox? What sketchbook is that in?’ and I know.

I know!

And unlike the first gallery, this one can have everything in every sketchbook. Because I streamlined the parts I hate (editing, watermarking, uploading, making thumbnails, importing into the database) and left myself only the parts I enjoy (writing comments and tagging). And while some of the original Stardancer’s features aren’t online yet, like multiple versions of the same image, they’re designed and in the queue… and this version can have cool new features, like user favorites, and requests from users who love something and want me to finish it.

I’m so forgetful. I keep trying to explain to people how much of a cheesecloth my brain is with just about everything. Without rigorous documentation, lists, and notebooks, I would be completely useless. Art is one of those places I document my thoughts and keep myself pointed in the right direction. The fourteen years I didn’t have a gallery are literally gone in my brain, artistically. I have to dig up the physical books and thumb through them to remember anything about them. So I think you can imagine my relief that this is now available… not just for you to enjoy. But for my sake, to keep myself from vanishing because I am no longer observing myself.

Right now the new gallery has 2644 images across the 42 sketchbooks (and one unfinished language notebook) I’ve scanned and uploaded… of the nearly 200 I have. I’m only just getting started. I am crazy excited, I can’t even tell you.

I have a gallery again.

I have a gallery again!

mcahogarth.org

Anyway, this is the part where I talk about how you can enjoy the gallery:

• If you make a free account, you can favorite things, make requests, and view 50 images a month at full size.

• If you’re paying here on Locals, you get unlimited access to everything in the gallery via a seasonal access code, and every three months I pin the new one to the top of the feed.

• If you prefer to buy a single year-long pass, I’ve got you covered on the shopify store here: $65 lets you fire and forget for twelve months, if like me you hate subscriptions. That's here: https://studiomcah.com/products/the-stardancer-gallery-one-year-pass

Every subscription and purchase helps keep the gallery open and supports our free users, so thank you so much for chipping in!

What can I say? Welcome home, my friends. Welcome back!