I’ve been involved with a number of web communities over the last several years, but hands down the best time I ever spent was with the group at Deviantart.
I found the site in the late 90s searching for wallpaper and joined up just as it was getting good and established. In a lot of ways it was the Myspace for people who liked to dink around with graphics, skins and desktop mods. I made a lot of great friends there and killed endless hours instant messaging and mailing back and forth. I also met a lot of people who helped me raise the level of art I was producing and offered great suggestions for improvement. I even have a couple of originals sent to me by individual artists themselves before the Prints business got up and around. It was more than a little addictive – you’d crank out a new work and the next day several friends and strangers were giving you compliments, criticism and suggestion. Long and hard I have burned for a music community that was so supportive, but I’ve yet to find one since the startup days of Mp3.com.
Eventually I left DA because I wanted to move on to other things besides cranking out pictures every night. No small part of that equation was the fact that DA had just gotten so big it was difficult to keep up with everyone anymore and the interest groups were splintering into smaller and smaller factions. Today it’s still a great community, but a little large to really get into.
I still have a pretty extensive gallery there. The header on the blog is actually a clip from one of the pieces there, Slow to Speak.
