(Click to enlarge.)

On October 20th of this year my NeoCities dashboard informed me that collectively all of the pages on this website amassed 10,000 views. Analytics are limited on my end so I don't know the proportion of new visitors to returning ones, or whether or not NeoCities' servers count an immediate bounce the same as someone who stuck around to read an entire story. I assume they do exclude crawlers and bots from the hit counter though because that's just been standard practice for about the past quarter of a century.

Regardless, this was a pretty nice milestone for me especially considering that just five months prior in May the website had only gathered 2,000 views. It's nice to know that readers are able to find this website, and with SoFurry being offline for maintenance perhaps that's given the pages here a slight boost in traffic because my work is exclusive to that platform and without it being online the only other place to read them is on my personal website here. To celebrate the occasion I wanted to try my luck at doing one of those "thanks for X hits" drawings that were so very common back in the early days of the web.

I wracked my brain thinking of who I wanted to draw because right away I had the silly idea to use breasts as the zeroes which required me to draw two ladies. I tried to think of a pair who "matched" like Fifi La Fume and Gadget Hackwrench, or Kazooie and Wave the Swallow, but the issue that came up was that in both of those examples I've only ever drawn one of the two before. I also don't think I'm established enough as a new artist to really have a character I'm "known" for drawing so I decided to look inward and come up with a couple of original characters based on the things I enjoy in general. So, here's a couple of dinosaur ladies; one of them a pool toy and the other a slime girl. Somehow Vinylla ("vinyl" + "vanilla") hadn't been claimed by someone for a pool toy character as far as I could tell.

Neither of these ladies are from a particular story or anything, they're just characters I imagined for this drawing specifically. However, if they turn out to be well-liked by everyone then I can take a swing at drawing them more often on their own. I drew them each as a separate image and then layered them together for the final picture as the program I do all my work in (Flash, seriously) does not like it when I draw things at 2000 x 3000 with a dozen layers; doing the ladies each in their own project file and then merging them later was the only way I was able to make this one happen. Because of this I had some issues with layer priority as well as arranging them spatially since I had to account for the pose of the other character without being able to see her on a locked layer. I also only drew Vinylla from the knees up because I did her first and when I drew Viscosia I wound up drawing her full-body because I used my previous self-portrait to reference the tail and feet. It's a learning experience for sure, but it was important to me to finish this before the end of the year. Enjoy!