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submitted by LuciferousDefect
[link] [1 comment]

This week’s illustration is from the cute mythological card deck “Mythic Chibi Playing Cards,” now on Kickstarter

The endless stream of “potato salad” projects seems to be abating on Kickstarter, which is a good thing, although now Indiegogo is being infected with them.

In the final analysis, the only strength Kickstarter has–which is major–is that it sorts things by date. This is super-helpful if you want to see everything that’s being crowdfunded, but with tons of random stuff clogging up the pipe, maybe less meaningful. Indiegogo has a few useful tools Kickstarter doesn’t–an image gallery, the ability to have multiple members of your team, Paypal (in our youth-dominated fandom, this is a minor but solid edge)…I personally think their “flexible funding” thing is not a benefit at all, since people use it as the default without really considering the hit they can take to their credibility and business plan.

Yap, yap, yap. The two platforms seemed to have arrived at a consensus on the “anything goes!” front. This means that Kickstarter will probably be MUCH more friendly to adult projects, which is helpful for many artists. But on the other paw, there really isn’t a “professional face of crowdfunding” anymore, which maybe a sign that the bubble isn’t burst, but maybe the balloon is deflating.

Reviews this week: Zhivagod’s DIY character reference sheet, FCLG’s animated short, and Sand and Shadows, the sequel to “Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb.”

New Projects

For a “complete” list of furry/fur-friendly crowdfunding projects, check out the Project Page and Patreon Page!

Art/Photography

Zhivago’s Ultimate Reference Sheet (Ends: 8/18/2014)
A new edition of Zhivagod‘s DIY Character Reference Sheet photoshop project, a walk-through to help anyone make their own anthro reference sheet–with feral options as the stretch goal!

Audio/Music

Audiobook: Captive of the Red Vixen (Ends: 8/15/2014)
Audio book version of the furry romance novel from the Red Vixen Adventures series.
Check the author on livejournal.

Children’s Products

Mr Dog’s Christmas at the Hollow Tree Inn (Ends: 8/14/2014)
Victorian-art inspired graphics make this Christmas story lively and intensely creepy. Mr. Dog tells his friends about the story of Santa Claus.

Comics/Graphic Novels

Wuffle the Big Nice Wolf Year 1 (Ends: 7/20/2014)
Friendly, retro-anime wolves, foxes, and other furries by Piti Yindee
I think this was funding on IndieGogo like three months ago, but it’s supercute…

Costumes/Clothing/Jewelry

Magicorn (Ends: 8/7/2014)
A soft plush unicorn hood/scarf with golden horn and pastel rainbow mane.

Whimsical Acrylic Charms (Ends: 8/9/2014)
Cute little cartoon fantasy-inspired charms.
I should just go and make charms their own category. Really.

Poke’pins (Ends: 8/12/2014)
Tiny little pokemon buttons by YasukawaDesu

Film/Animation/Theater

Forever, Rabbit (Ends: 8/11/2014)
Indie film about an introverted fellow who works as a rabbit mascot for a local flower shop, falling in love and/or obsession.

Anime FcLife Ep 2 (Ends: 8/31/2014)
A charming, cheerful animation of a group of furries and their friends, based on the FCLG artist group’s comics. Check Episode 1.

Video Games

The Deer God (Ends: 7/23/2014)
3D/pixel metroidvania-Ecco the Dolphin game about surviving as a deer.
Much less creepy than Goat Simulator. And well past goal!

Zippin Quest: The Dark Kingdom (Ends: 8/15/2014)
Zelda/Metroid inspired game, a mouse warrior on a 2D quest.
GREAT concept art, but who knows what that’ll translate into.

Inherit the Earth: Sand and Shadows (Ends: 8/19/2014)
point and click game and webcomic in a future where humans have vanished, and the dominant species are tribes of anthro animals.
Sequel to “”

Web

Kaze: Winds of Change (Ends: 8/4/2014)
Illustrated audio drama prequel for the 2004 animated short, Kaze: Ghost Warrior
Full disclosure, this is my pet project. So please donate $32000 right now so I don’t have to do it again!

…Also by furries

Blaine Blows His Top Children’s Book Series (Ends: 7/31/2014): A children’s book series about figures of speech, art by Chibi-Marrow

…Just for fun

Phoenix – Dragon Mutant Vehicle (Ends: 8/5/2014): Every year amazing projects drift across the Playa at Burning Man. Check out this amazing dragon art car.

 

 What’s Corbeau Backing This Week?

Current crowdfunding dollars going to Eliza Rickman’s quirky new album, which I stumbled across in the Night Vale fandom. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Pacific Hotline’s debut album–I *think* they’re both furries, but mostly I love 80s retro! And, of course, Terrene Odyssey, I’ve been watching this project for over a year now and really want to see it take off…finally :) Good luck, Chris!

i am planing to GM a game of pathfinder and i need players. this will an all werewolf group. new players are welcome.my time is GMT+3 and i can play any day or time except for part of Tuesday and Wednesday.

submitted by alienbee1
[link] [17 comments]

** Sorry if I offend anyone!!! ILY furrys >.=.< <3... I am British & stupid D: ... Just be nice to know I guess!.... Don't kill me :'( ***

So I have just found out about Otherkin.....and im quite new to fursona ect ...

What is your fursona supposed to represent? ie; Is it you? another form of you? or just a character you had thought up? or?....

What I have read & gathered about Otherkin, Is that you believe that you are not human... another animal or what not inside a human body .. i think...

Anyway! Lets say that you love your fursona.... & you make a fursuit? (I really want one :3 !! ) does that not kinda cross into otherkin?

Is being a furry and otherkin black and white? Or do these two ever cross I guess?

& Just anything else you want to add, hope I dont offend anyone!! Hope you are having a good day anyway. Thanks for reading .=.^

submitted by Mootness
[link] [12 comments]

Hello! Sorry for the inconvenient yammer on, but i had a question. Could this and this be used in a comic, not the characters, but the art style. It's lazy, but i had a problem with it being similar to Bed fellows, and regular show. I'm not saying they are lazy because they are both in fact great series, but i'm going to make a series in this style. I'm calling it Miscellaneous Shenanigans. It will be just that!

PM me if you want your character to be in it, i'm open to anything.

submitted by Dante_The_Wolf
[link] [3 comments]

After 20 years, a return to the post-apocalyptic/medieval world of “Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb”…

Inherit the Earth: Sand and Shadows

Kickstarter ending 8/19/14

The year is 1994, and computer graphics are what you’d expect them to be. “Dark Stalkers” spawns a few years of well-justified John Talbain/Galon rule 34, Sonic meets Tails, and things were kind of pixellated and grainy, but we didn’t know any better. Enter “Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb.”

The time: the unknowable future. Humanity is a thing of the past, having, according to Wiki, wiped itself out with a biological weapon. However many years later, Earth’s animals have established a medieval society in the wreckage, and humans are something of a myth, even a religion.

If you haven’t followed the original game, you might want to skim over the webcomic, which expands on and recaps the plot of the game and world. The game’s available online or (I think?) on portable devices, clever people can find a copy somewhere, and a trial version is available on the Kickstarter.  The story runs something like, “Rif, a fox, goes to the Big City (well, plot-centric village) to compete in a puzzle contest, but when the Orb of Storms–an old human techno-relic–is stolen, he’s accused, and goes on a quest to find the relic and its thief.” Oh, the puzzles that will be solved.

That was some years ago, and rumors are surfacing about the original orb surviving, and a terrible drought that is almost certainly tied to the orb’s weather-related functions. Rif sets out on another journey, this time with MUCH smoother graphics and a wider world.

At its heart, Inherit the Earth: Sand And Shadows is the child of its ancestor: a point-and-click  game, lots of dialog and conversation, lots of puzzles. The original game was set up for a sequel, maybe even a trilogy–what happened to the orb? Where are the humans?–and left on something of an open “The End…Or Is It?” note. So hopefully Sand and Shadows will answer a lot of questions.

The Kickstarter project itself? It’s strong. The pledge points are everything you’d hope for from a video game launch that’s targeting an established fan base. At low levels, some good swag–posters, a reasonably affordable “your character here” in the game as a background element ($600, a good price for this sort of thing, from what I’ve seen), with appropriately saliva-inducing bells at the high end: a speaking role in the game, attending the game’s launch party with travel expenses (!), and other good stuff. The stretchgoals are textbook, but in a good way: mobile device support, extra cut scenes, extra languages (I’d personally want that Android support at a lower level–or even as the starting point, the look and feel of the game really lends itself to portable devices.)

Criticism? I don’t really have any major ones. From an uneducated non-programmer perspective, as I said, I think the game lends itself well to portable devices, and that might be a better starting point, but I’m not remotely qualified to say whether that’s actually a good idea or not. One point made of the original game that may still be true, is that it has some very adult ideas and a “ages 11 and up” target audience, which may not be a viable audience range (particularly with the way anthro subject matter draws the target age downward, at least to the non-furry audience member.)

That, and the goal is going to be a challenge, and a long road. Games can meet the “crowdfunding for the actual cost of the game” goal, Armello managed it, but they had a strong launch campaign and seemed to capture a lot of audiences at once–board gaming convention goers, the greater video game community, and probably some furries as well. With Inherit it seems like their primary ask is to their existing fanbase, and that’s not going to bring in the money to hit that high, $160K goal.

Regardless! If you want to see this project succeed, it’s going to need retweets and reposts. Consider leaving a comment on their main page–that sort of thing helps the project look stronger on Kickstarter’s analytical engine. Talk it up–on the kickstarter page, and on your own social media–conversation goes a long way toward keeping the project viable through the full campaign.

Note: Images used above are included to promote the work of crowdfunding artists, and are owned by the original creator.

 

 

 

 

submitted by ZhivagoD
[link] [2 comments]

I had this dream last night that I was enrolled in art school. The current assignment was anthropomorphic characters, so as every classy and modern furry would do - I drew an extremely NSFW yiff picture on a large canvas.

My instructor and fellow students treated me as if I were Jony Ive and hung up my large yiff painting in front of the class so all could stare at it throughout the rest of the lessons. Then, it became a fashion statement. There were purses like as in Vera Bradley designs but instead of floral patterns it was yiff pictures. Sleek dresses were accompanied by very graphic yiff photos.

A few weird, dream stuff happened blah blah blah and I found myself being treated and known as the Yiff God.

So, that was my dream ~

submitted by PortableTaco
[link] [14 comments]

submitted by HappyWulf
[link] [3 comments]

Why Furry

by Frank LeRenard

 

It’s one of those extremely difficult, often tiresome, and seemingly ubiquitous questions in furry fiction: why use anthropomorphic animals and not just humans? And I see all manners of mental acrobatics going on amongst all of us in trying to answer it. We’ve come up with some decent excuses along the way: simple stylistic choice, a means to bring up complicated issues like racism without offending, etc. But it’s a tough question to answer effectively, because in the end the reason may simply be that we think anthro animals are cool.

But there’s a sort of hidden tradition embedded in furry lit, something a bit more penetrating and philosophical than what usually comes to mind.

So, we homo sapiens spend an awful lot of time trying to understand ourselves. All of the so-called great literature of our day seems to be focused on that nebulous concept we call ‘the human condition’. I’m sure part of this quest stems from the general idea that humans are super special, something new and interesting in the universe, the most intelligent creatures of Planet Earth and masters of all that surrounds us. So in our sometimes overly simplistic thinking, we try to reconcile that idea with the well-known fact that humans also often act like completely irrational beings, fighting and killing over stuff like jealousy or love or power (so-called ‘animal’ things), and this confuses us and makes us ponder what truly makes us human.

But really, as time has gone on, a lot of things have become clear. For one, we aren’t the center of the universe. The universe, in fact, has no center because it exists as a kind of geometry for which a center is impossible to describe. We’re not the center of our own solar system, either; the sun is. And the more we study our neighbors, those other ‘lower’ species that inhabit this little planet with us, the more we start to realize that we’re even pretty closely connected with all of them, too. We share many behaviors with other animals: crows can use tools, elephants display empathy, octopi can figure out how to open jars even if they’ve never seen one before. Maybe the time has also come for us to admit that we’re not the center of the Earth’s ecosystem either.

So what do we as a species do in this new realm of apparent purposelessness? It seems a bit of a depressing existential quandary to deal with. But, you see, this isn’t the only way to think of it. Because in this realm, what’s really happening is that we’re finally starting to perceive the ‘other’.

One of the most famous photographs ever taken was an incidental one nabbed by Bill Anders in 1968 while he was on the moon, which was later dubbed ‘Earthrise’. He admitted that getting the shot wasn’t even in the plan at the time; just one of those moments where you turn around and think to yourself, ‘Oh, that’s cool. I should take a picture of that’. But it resonated deeply in the public. It was the first picture of Earth taken from another world. A first outside look at the place where we all live, a giant blue marble set against a deep black backdrop, a splash of color juxtaposed with the dreary cratered grayness of the moon’s surface. Earth in its proper context.

But the topic here is anthro characters in fiction. You see, it’s hard to build a complete picture of something if you’re living inside it. This is as much true for humanity as it is for the Earth or the Milky Way galaxy. The fact that we are the only species we know how to communicate with on a fundamental level is problematic in that respect, because we can never really gain an outsider’s view of our own species. And so we’re left with this conundrum, this constant effort to learn more about ‘the human condition’ by peering at it through human eyes.

But fiction is bigger than that, because it relies on this thing we have called ‘imagination’. Maybe we can’t see ourselves as we truly are from our current vantage point, but we can always pretend. In our imagination, we can sit back and take the long view, look at the Earth from the moon.

There are other options than anthropomorphized animals, of course. Aliens, magical beings, robots, etc. But at some point, if you get too far out there, the whole picture just starts to look like a barely visible blue dot amongst billions and it loses its impact. You don’t want to get so far out that you can’t even find the thing you were supposed to be trying to understand. Who knows how aliens might even think? Do they have bifocal vision, hearing organs, stomachs? Do they see better in visible light or infrared? Do they see different wavelengths as colors? Do they communicate through speech, chemical signals, vibrations in the ground, what? And robots can pose a similar problem, assuming we’re the ones programming them; they either have this simplistic, binary manner of thinking that ends up generating seemingly bizarre solutions to common problems (see: a modern robot trying to enter a car; there’s a video of this somewhere), or else they just end up thinking themselves superior and take over the world.

But I already mentioned that there’s a nice midpoint that’s readily available: other animals. They’re different, but we have common ground. We know they exist, too, and we’ve taken some time to study them, so you don’t have to start completely from scratch. Plus, we all evolved through fairly similar pathways, even think in similar ways about certain things, yet our biologies and brains are distinct. It works out very well for the imagination, as a little spark to step out of the realm of being human, but not so far that your whole audience (who is, until further notice, always going to be human themselves) can’t relate to it. Why not exploit this? Because talking animals are kiddie stuff?

Of course, that’s the point I’m making. They aren’t, or at least they don’t have to be. You want to explore ‘the human condition’ like all great literature is apparently supposed to do, you do it from the outside. And there’s this great resource sitting right beside us that we can exploit for that purpose. Use it.

Or else just do it because anthro animals are cool, I guess.

 

Author: Dear Papabear, I want to start off by saying thank you for all the work you do answering people’s letters, and giving support to those in need of a warm bear hug. Your column has really helped me and many others through rough times. Thank you for taking time to read our letters, and […]

submitted by HappyWulf
[link] [9 comments]

I can't afford a commision and would be really greatful if someone were to draw my fursona out of the kindness of their hearts. I know it's stupid to ask for free art as it's like asking a for a free haircut or a free meal at a fancy restaurant. If anyone is willing to draw me my fursona I would have no issues with artistic liberties.

I'll post what I'm looking for if someone responds. Thanks in advanced and please don't hurt me...

submitted by Terwin94
[link] [2 comments]

submitted by vriskas3rket
[link] [6 comments]

I used t to have two voices in my head. One was logical and calm and the other was manic. Now there's archer, my melanistic wolf/jaguar, who preaches understanding and love. Has anyone else come across this as well?

submitted by duskeater
[link] [2 comments]

Hello. I currently have $80 AUD and I'm looking to get a commish, I have no ref sheet or any real distinct description of my fursona which I assume artists dislike. But does anyone know of a good artist that would help me?

submitted by Vynlamor
[link] [11 comments]

I'll admit I don't fully understand what a fursona is (I just started getting involved in the furry scene), but I wanted to give my hand a try at some art. So I've drawn a first draft of what I hope will evolve into my own character I named Shamino. Right now I feel he bears too close a resemblance to King from HousePetComics - but I'm confident I'll get him more diverse over time.

So here is my first draft of Shamino!

submitted by Aion1125
[link] [2 comments]

I know it's bad form to ask an artist for a free drawing as it is often their livelihood, but I was wondering if anyone would be able to draw me my first picture of my fursona.

If anyone knows of any artists that do requests (as opposed to only commissions) that would be great as well.

submitted by Terwin94
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submitted by kitten00killer
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submitted by Arcsec-the-Grey
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