Re-posting all of this old Dear Dewey Teagarden ask blog entries from Fur Affinity has turned out to be fun for me. It serves as a really snapshot of how I used to function as a hobby artist.

I started DDT as a simple exercise. I've always liked that idea that there are no bad ideas, just bad execution. Back in 2012, a few friends of mine were talking in a Skype call about how it would be fun to take cliché ideas and try to make them fun and interesting. I wanted an excuse to draw furry art again, having been away for nearly a decade (and not drawing nearly that entire time, maybe once or twice a year). The sexy librarian trope is a classic, but always treated in movies/fiction as a woman who could be beautiful if she only took off her glasses and let her hair down. But that formality and spectacles are the things I loved about the trope, so I wanted to create a character who was sexy because she was smart and highly sexual.

I love smut. I really, really do, and I don't like to pretend otherwise. I like the softcore side as much as the hardcore. I also like smut that is sex positive. I don't like to demean others, or be demeaned for our fetishes. I wanted that be the main theme of the project. So I set about to make a character that fit that criteria and let the world around her, and herself too, build up as I went. Dewey and her co-workers change as time goes by. I tried a lot of things on as I went along. Some things I kept, others I abandoned. She's fundamentally the same now as when I started, but she's grown a lot and become a more fully fledged character.

The main reason I stopped running the ask blog is because of work. I worked hard in my field for 20 years, and I burned out hard, and that burn out took it's toll on everything in my life. I used to work on blog art/letters in the space of one or two hours after work, and if I couldn't complete the entry in that time, I didn't complete it. As a result, some are detailed and thought out than others. That was where I was back then. I've since managed to sort out my life and depression issues. For the record, my depression is chemical imbalance based and will never be sorted without constant help. So what I mean is, I've learned to identify when my depression is making decisions for me and to step back. I was definitely not good at that back then.

It's been fun to look back and see how much has changed. Dear Dewey Teagarden was my reintroduction to drawing, and I had to relearn everything. It was tough. Things that used to feel so effortless was a real struggle. Maybe it doesn't always show, but I attribute that to my knowledge of Adobe Illustrator. I used it everyday at work for the past 20 years, so I know it very well. All the original DDT posts were drawn with a mouse in Illustrator. Big shapes, simplistic line art as an affectation, lots and lots of gradients and fills, all vector based.

I've since moved on to drawing on a tablet, and that has also brought in a new challenge. I now work in a completely different way, in software that is completely new to me. All that tech knowledge I had before I can no longer hide behind. It's amazingly fun. Something else has happened too. Because of letting go of those old ways of working, I no longer feel like I'm on the job. That separation is really necessary.

I was sorely tempted to fix things before re-posting them. I let my Creative Cloud subscription lapse, so that quelled any ideas of remastering I may have had. And too, it's best to let the past stand. I can always look back on it and be reminded that I've moved forward, often sideways, and that I've experimented often. All of which are good things.

I'm almost completely caught up. I only made 46 or 47 entries. Once I get them all migrated, I'll start posting stand alone art. I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the past.