Amazingly enough, it was a full 20 years ago that I posted my first piece of artwork online, and just thinking about that stretch of time feels at once like the passage of an eternity and that so much was still left undone. When I was a young kid I drew and painted just about as much as anyone – maybe a little more – but as I got older I lost that creative drive and by high school had pretty much forgotten about it. It was only when I discovered the furry fandom that I suddenly felt that spark return, because here were these weird animal characters (very much not just for kids) that people were filling with life and personality, for no other reason than the joy of it. This kicked off a summer of furious sketching where I felt like I was learning how to really draw for the very first time, my only tools being printer paper and a No. 2 pencil. And I thrived on it because I finally discovered a creative outlet that fit me. Of course, going through this basic learning phase I didn’t feel a desire to share my progress with anyone, let alone the world, but after several months I felt like I was maybe finally getting to that point.

At this time, besides creating a personal website, there were only two obvious options to me for posting furry artwork: Yerf, which had active and helpful forums but an intensive gallery approval process, and VCL, which only required proof that you knew how to clean up scanned artwork. As a relative neophyte, I went with the latter, and in January of 2004 made my first ever upload. (It was a colored pencil drawing of a cape fox fixing the engine on a C-47, and I'd be seriously amazed if anyone remembers ever having seen it.) The only metrics I had on how well it was received was a view counter updated once daily, and you better believe I watched it like a hawk. The details of who saw my work and what they thought were totally unknowable to me, and until I discovered DeviantArt and started posting there, that just seemed to be a fact of life.

Today, VCL is unbrowsable and it doesn’t look like the Internet Archive spared me the embarrassment of ever caching any of my uploads. A lot of the work from other artists around that time is just nowhere to be found either, which makes me glad for what I did save back then, but I suspect a lot of it is gone for good. I guess it would be fair to shout out some favorites from back then, some of whom had a big impact on how my own style developed, including Kacey, DarkNatasha, EbonyLeopard, Skunkworks, MaxBlackrabbit, and MoodyFerret.

Even though the fandom was very much a well-developed community by the time I discovered it, there was still a little digging required to find its online presence. It had the feel of an underground subculture, much more than it does today, and in some ways that obscurity made it a more welcoming place for me to freely be a weirdo for the first time in my life, even if my parents didn’t get it (this is quite an understatement). Both the quantity and quality of furry art has skyrocketed since then, and I doubt finding a way to stand out has ever been tougher. As the fandom grows and grows, I guess it’s all about finding your group within it, and I met a lot of amazing people over those past two decades, some of whom became good friends. There are still others I’ve only passively watched or briefly interacted with who I wish I’d reached out to years ago. All the same, I’m really grateful I found a place I could nurture this creative outlet of mine and find people with the same kinds of passions. Sometimes I wonder where my life would be if artwork wasn’t a part of it, and I really, honestly couldn’t say, but I doubt the trip here would have been as interesting.