Stranger in a Strange Land

So I'm soon going to complete the process of moving in at Deviant Art; the boxes are all in the right rooms, and loads of stuff is already unpacked, and there are only a few large bits of furniture that I still want to move three or four times till I've got everything all set.  Oh, and I found the cat.  He was with the towels.

I showed up on your doorstep about a week ago, all because this place offered me something I've really wanted for ages:  a way to produce very high quality archival prints from my digital images.  I have an existing venue for selling merchandise and I've been really happy with it, but the one thing that I'd wanted from the beginning was those archival prints.  So when I'd run a test through Deviantprints and saw the results I started moving all my existing work-for-print over here.

I'd had a look around, and I knew that this site is essentially a community site; I'd seen the journals, the forums, and the commentary and so - while I was heaving those boxes of bytes through the doorway - I said to myself, "Hey, self!  You're going to need to check all this out.  There's a lot more going on in here than printing."  And I meant to take my advice just as soon as I'd found the cat.

But as it happened, you all found me first.  That's all due to the happy accident of me blundering into a Daily Deviation without really having much idea of what that meant.  Though I sure figured it out, believe me.  And I really have appreciated all the welcomes and praise and the hundreds of new names and faces that I've needed to keep straight - it's been amazing.  The things that have worried me most have been that I'd fail to respond enough to any of you, which would seem rude of me, or that I'd lose track of some of the really interesting work that everyone else is doing.  I'm sure trying to keep my bearings.  Please don't forget that I'm awfully new here, and still struggle a bit with what comment showed up where and what's threaded and what's not and where, after all, the cat got to again, because I just unpacked the towels and there's no sign of him anymore.

And I've got to say that one of the things that amazes me at this site is the large number of young artists who have their own pages and their own body of work, and who can connect with other people all over the globe to talk about that work - or anything else.  I can't imagine what it would have been like when I was your age if I'd had an inroad into this sort of community of likeminded people.  I hope you appreciate how great and new a thing that is!

On the other hand, I am pretty pleased to find the occasional person who makes me feel less like an old geezer, even if I am one.  Especially if I am one.

So expect the following, if you're Watching:  I'll be adding a few more designs for a couple of days, and following that I'm going to try to figure out how best to integrate these prints into my online venture.  Then I'll try to implement that, and though from time to time I think I may post some work in progress, there may be a long wait between large, really interesting pieces.  That's because - though you've seen a bunch of them show up over the past week - I really spend a very long time on them!

And as things quiet down a bit I'll be able to backtrack your own work, if I haven't, and get a more thorough look through the things I've found already.  I'm looking forward to that.

So thanks to all!  And if I start calling everybody "Steve", it's just because I've met so many of you in such a short time that I can't contain any more names.  I don't mean anything by it.