I quit art for a hot minute because i lost literally all passion for it. I was only drawing because I had no income other than comms so when I got an Actual Job I had no reason to keep doing something I'd started to hate somewhere along the way. drawing the same 5 dragons in different fonts for half a decade does something to you I guess. and coming home from an 8 hour shift I don't want to hunch over my big desk tablet like a shrimp yknow??

but I got a new phone a couple months back which came with a pressure sensitive pen and decided to download clip studio on a whim. turns out it's an infinitely better set up for me because I can literally just lie in bed lmao. and drawing just for me without deadlines for the first time in years is so, so nice.

following on from that, I'm formally retiring commission work. I haven't advertised them since I took my break and closed my FR thread but I don't think I said anything here so. here's me saying it here. Thank you to everyone who commissioned me over the years, you saved my butt so many times!! hopefully we'll never end up back in that situation 🙏🙏

i hated how restrictive commission work could be at times and how it limited who I could make things for, so I'm really looking forward to doing stuff like art trades and dtday again! if you want to do an art trade HIT ME UPPPP

The big FR related thing I've been working on behind the scenes is my lore revamp which I'm torn between posting here or on my alt once it's ready. I've always tried to keep this page tidy for portfolio reasons but if I don't need it for that anymore,, eh. idk. open to opinions does anyone even want to see it is anyone still reading I'm gonna shut up now

Have you ever wondered which FR dragons are the most popular to draw? No? Well clearly you're not a university student with looming deadlines, a severe procrastination problem and unlimited access to research grade statistics software let's dive in

Originally I was doing this to see which dragons I'd drawn the most for commissions over the years, but then I got curious generally about if the popularity of dragon breeds correlated with the amount of fanart produced. We artists are always fighting algorithms and trends, so this info may be useful to those of us looking to utilise them!

A brief intro/some disclaimers to the data:

I've only included modern breeds as they are more numerous than ancients on-site, have been around for less time (excl. Obelisks) and Excel was already protesting with what I had so I saved myself the headache. Look forward to the ancient breed sequel ahahahah :P that's a joke i'm not doing this again

For my 'tumblr popularity' data, I counted the breed of dragon of the first 100 featured in the '#flight rising art' tag. I excluded ancients and any unidentifiable breeds. Each individual dragon was counted in multi-image posts, unless if the dragon(s) in question were in a comic, series etc. in which case each unique dragon was counted once.

Assuming my personal commission stats are the least interesting to most people, but I'll give some background. I started doing comms in mid-2018, producing art at a relatively impressive volume (rip my time and motivation.) I do a lot less FR art now, but if we assume breed popularity has stayed consistent since then the only breed this should really effect are Obelisks as the newbies.

And then finally, on-site breed popularity. I used the dragon search feature on FR to identify the number of named, active dragons for each breed. Total dragons as of 27/01/24, if you were curious: 12,924,070! That's a lot of guys!!

I threw everything into percentages, then made a graph. it's got issues probably but my degree isn't in niche pixel dragon info and i was getting bored at this point

I ran some stuff through statistical tests but they don't show anything remarkable that you can't see in the graph. Rstudio claimed a few more years from my lifespan for naught

Conclusions:

Skydancers and Imperials are crazy popular in all categories, but SDs are Tumblr's favourite

Obelisks and Ridgebacks do disproportionately well on Tumblr compared to their site popularity

Snappers and Bogsneaks are pretty unpopular across the board. I've never drawn either! But at least snaps are getting a bit of love on here

The popularity of Faes and Guardians on-site is not significantly reflected in fanart (excl. Guardian comms for me which is? an odd outlier??)

Mirrors and Nocturnes are not popular on Tumblr - found the latter interesting as I thought there may be lingering bias from NotN, but apparently not

Coatls, Pearlcatchers, Spirals and Tundras are pretty consistent between categories. Nothing really of note for these guys except for less people wanting me to draw spirals (good they're complicated)

I could draw a Wildclaw with my eyes closed and although that will not make me popular, it can make me money

Well that was a good use of 4 hours I'm going to write my essay now