Hey, check it out, I won an animooted stamp featuring alot of deviations in my gallery, love the personalization! what do I do with it? I like having it, I want more of them.

OH HELLS YA! I won a subscription, or two!

That worked out really well, and I'd like to point a finger to this thing called PAGEVIEWS, I have them now, haha! I used to be in all these clubs and things for "unseen artists" such as the club of the same name, but now, its not necessary, I removed them, I don't want to see their unseen artists flooding my inbox, its predominantly fail art.

Instrument on Azimuth won third in Markopolio's February contest
Potion got runner up in CreateByWeek's Week42 contest

And while pageviews and TRYING to get my works seen are no longer concerns, getting MORE and FASTER always give me a warm fuzzy feeling, because well.. its downright hilarious. People whore themselves all over dA for years and I see them having 500 pageviews, or a low number that says they should join UnseenArtists while I have a statistically skewed growth pattern measuring (time : pageviews) that is well above average. Thats what gives me the tingling feeling, beating the odds.  

I can go to the forums and start a thread asking people "what do you do for more pageviews" honestly looking for their answer, where the most EFFECTIVE answer is

       

but the first reaction is that I am a blatant attention whore, lo and behold, they come to my page and I ALREADY HAVE PAGEVIEWS. I only mention it because they want them. The people that want them the most are the same people that will say "there's more to the community than that, if you're here for the pageviews you will never get them" ... except I've been here for like, 5 months and have more than you will have in years?

Forget IP switching and proxies, I dont need fake pageviews, I am content with REAL HUMANS seeing my work, dA or not. Most of my views don't come from dA, just all over the world, and I like it and I plan on getting more.

Also, I love the gimmicky features that having a subscription allows! I honestly NEVER checked my deviantWatch for that short 2 weeks that I didn't have a subscription, it was so inconvenient. I am winning the internets.

NOW FOR SOME E-LOVE:
and Ranum's Chicks!

dA is like crack cocaine! I NEED A SUB I NEED A SUB I NEED A SUB I NEED A SUB! Just realized my 3 month subscription will be running out soon, it seems like I've been unconsciously trying to create better visuals to win contests - not for pageviews - not for journal features - but for SUBSCRIPTIONS! Its like I have shifted motivations solely to keep the features that I have as a subscriber.

In my workflow for photomanipulating I tend to add more and more to the process of creating visually stunning pieces of art. For instance instead of just layering some photos on top of each other I add in an adjustment layer between them. After the adjustment layer I add a texture, after the texture I add a layer mask.... borders... titles... more recently, watermarks. And now I am adding in fractals, because most fractal art by itself I realize can be visually pleasing with little or no effort on the creators part aside from luck so therefore I'm adding them in my photomanipulation process.

I'm teaching myself airbrushing and more digital painting because alot of the best manipulation's I've seen using stock models involved repainting the model. I find that interesting, do I even want to do that?

Vectoring: not sure if want due to whats involved and how that cool look is only tracing, but so is the repainting technique. But I'd love to manipulate vectors style art into my pieces.