From my early days I was always interested in digital art. The first images I saw fascinated me. They were unlike any other art I was familiar with and I had to learn how to create them. Smilies also fascinated me and, likewise, I had to learn how to make my own. Then came digital animation and that topped my list of cool things to learn to do. So I jumped into Blender (a software program) and mocap (motion capture). I got pretty good at making meshes and have made steady income from selling them for many years now. I specialize in, not realism, as I at first did, but in realistic animation. That gives me a chance to be expressive without the confines of what actually is. I do use myself as the model, or one of my friends. Even the hairstyles I use in my animations are based on my own. Zoë Mozert, the woman who invented the pin-up -- and the term "pin-up" -- used herself as her model, so I'm in good company.
Of course, with the coming of AI and LLM all those skills are obsolete. It's progress, I guess, opening up the most sophisticated creative processes to everyone. And AI will take those creative processes in directions I doubt we can imagine. These are just the early days.
But us old timers will remember the thrill of creation as it was in the golden days of yesteryear. This, using myself as the model, is from my high school days when digital art was, I suppose, no longer new, but it being available to anybody with a PC was. It got over 250,000 views when I uploaded it to an old blog I had, which was pretty good in those days.
