Based on a live sketch of my sweetheart Leto, who is expecting our first child and is well into the 4th month now. <3 A lot of great new things are going on in our life and I gotta reorganize so I’ll be a bit less active in the next months, but I have plenty of new ideas too!
 
It’s fun to think that a drawing like this would have been unthinkable for me when I started doodling furry art 25 years ago. It happened more or less at this time of the year in fact - summer of 1996, when I first got home internet access and soon discovered the furry fandom and began creating my own furry characters. There were very few (if any) furry pictures based on live studies back then. Furry art of the 80s and 90s was all about drawing from the mind and appropriating cartoon/comic/anime characters that in turn had been mostly constructed from the mind. Most importantly, even when furry art was used to express intensely personal feelings everybody kind of assumed it had to be kept separate from other aspects of life. The very idea that somebody could model for furry art would have sounded bizarre back then. Why would anyone want that? The then new concept of “fursona” was seen by most furries as going too far and taking personal fantasies too seriously. Furry wasn’t supposed to be about reality.
 
Of course there are many fantasies that shouldn’t be brought anywhere near real life and real people, but furry art always was an immensely powerful tool with the potential to capture the most down to earth moments of life too. That much was clear to me since the first time I browsed a major furry art archive. Maybe nobody was doing it yet, maybe the result would never be called great art and would only resonate with a selected few, but the potential was there.
 
With time many artists realized it. I love the feeling of vintage furry art, but when I browse my (pretty huge) collection of furry art from 20-30 years ago I find almost all of it very impersonal, staging impossible fantasies and describing ideal characters way detached from real life. Nothing wrong with it of course - it just makes me smile that some people thought furry artists would (or could) only ever do that. Nowadays there’s also plenty of furry art portraying real life events and real feelings between real people. I think this makes furry art as a whole more grounded and more interesting to people who don’t care about the geeky stuff.
 
On my part, I’m very happy that furry art has become so interwoven with my life that I want to make drawings like this one to immortalize my partner and some of the most precious moments of our life.