On This Week's Episode of Roy and Betsy PLUS 3.

So I promised to not leak secret art from Roy's scrapbook that I'm drawing in for him FOREVER, but some pieces like these will slip through the cracks because they really aren't "hush-hush" worthy. You lucky internet. Enjoy the terrible coloring :)
So here's anrtho Roy, anthro me (Betsy), and Pockets (hamster), Orion (corgi), and Mister Kitty.

Me and my boys....
We're BFF's.

$10 Sketch Commissions gone wild :)

I'm offering these until I drop!

Kae-Mantis Commission

Best frog-inspired character design...ever. Props to Kae for being so darned brilliant. I was flattered to pieces to do this one.

Oh-hooo, an update!

Betsy and Roy...a semi-brief history.

Some people may or may not know that the "rabbit" and "squirrel" that I have doodled over the past few years are actually based off of real people. Betsy is myself, and Roy is my long-term love-dove/best friend and now fiance. We are celebrating our 6 year anniversary on May 30th, and it seemed appropriate to resurrect some older art of our characters and explain their beginnings.

I've loved drawing animals ever since I was a child thanks to my Don Bluth/Loony Tunes obsessions. I've also had a particular love for drawing forest animals. I've loved all kinds of art forms (especially comicbook art), but nothing was more fun or comforting for me then to doodle within life-long favorite art genre...2-dimensional "funny animals".

After drawing for years, I dropped the hobby for couple of years...and picked it up again in 2004...right around the time my younger sister introduced me to deviantART, where come to find out there were others out there like me who love drawing animal characters as much as I do, and also pretended they were animals when they were kids! (Not always typical "furries").

When I joined deviantART, I had generic pieces to share, but didn't have a flagship avatar character to "mingle" with the rest. So I constructed a representative character that would be similar to myself, and was a combination of my obsession with Don Bluth and Disney's The Lion King. The character, although she was created with love, was also created rather quickly to get an avatar out there to join the MUCK ranks. So in otherwords, had much character developement before she was 100% alive in my eyes.

People who are newcomers to my drawings probably didn't know that "Betsy the squirrel" started off as a little brown cat named "Saidie"...then soon named "Betsy" after me. She over the span of a few years gradually evolved into the creature that I pretended to be and lived incognito as a child...the squirrel.
Looking at this change in a "furry perspective", I didn't have enough of a "feline" personality to have a cat avatar, and the squirrel to me became all the more perfect based on personal history and my mannerisms.

To clear up a common misconception about animal avatars, (or as the furries call them, "fursonas") Avatars, or self-manifestation characters aren't always a window into how a person feels about themself. I don't believe that I am a squirrel. I did, kind of, when I was in kindergarten, but what child didn't play pretend? If an animator drew a transformation, or a "critterture" of myself, "Betsy the squirrel" is what I'd imagine it would be.

What do I mean by a "critterture"? (Many people have definitions for this, but this is how I see it):
Example<---Take for instance this film. Rodney Dangerfield wasn't a furry, but this animated film makes him look like one to people who judge right away! However, the animator took the man, and transformed him into an animated dog. Same concept here! This is why I'm associated with furries, but am not 100% a part of them.Same concept applies to Roy.
Roy's avatar is a special case. Unlike me, he was not as heavily influenced by animated movies involving forest animals, and didn't pretend to be an animal himself. He however has always been a fan of Loony Tunes and Roger Rabbit... he has been consistently a fan of rabbit characters all along. However, this didn't influence his character at first.
In 2005, I was drafting ideas for a somewhat serious back story of Betsy, about what happens when some animals were born intelligent and got together conspiring to hit the human race hard so they could gain equal rights. (kind of like NIMH). It involved a gun slinging male cat that becomes Betsy's love interest... My avatar, being a cat, didn't have a "mate"... so I made one... obviously influenced by Roy himself.
The idea caved, but the characters remained.

The rabbit version didn't come about until Christmas Eve 2006 when he asked: "Make me a fursona or whatever you call it." I laughed and said, "No way am I putting you through that kind of shame," while laughing hysterically, however, it sounded like a great idea... since the "cat" version of him didn't seem all that right either. He asked me to make him a rabbit, and it was a perfect match for his personality. (The fabled "first picture" is the image with him hugging our ...at the time...kitten).
His character hasn't changed much over the years, except that he got a haircut, his tattoo is only visible on the anthro form, and the infamous "mole" appeared on his face sometime in 2008. I don't remember when, I just remember thowing it on there and said, "Oh hey... that." And it stuck.

If you like Fred & Wilma, Peter & Lois, and Jay & Silent Bob...you'll probably like Betsy & Roy...maybe.

Couple dynamics: They've always coincidentally had the same theme. Roy being the reserved big guy always seems to be getting smothered by Betsy the loud-mouth whimsy-machine. The duo has almost the same dynamic as Jay and Silent Bob, the obnoxious little guy and the big silent guy with the trench-coat. (Kind of similar to us in real life).
With our avatars becoming more developed as "people", they became my guinea pigs for dappling in anthropomorphic art. During this time, I also dappled in "erotica" or as the furs call it "yiff" for a brief period of time...and have long since retired as a mature artist as a private market, and free public level.

The anthro versions of us were set to be the main characters in my sister's and my web-comic. It also included Roy's fictional gay brother "LeRoy" (who is basically a heavier, homosexual version of Roy, with little ears and light tan fur) and also bringing back my character's old feline form (now making him male) and naming him Elliot, who is LeRoy's lover. This project has been on the backburner for quite some time and who knows when we can find the time to concentrate on it.

So...there you go! If you read this, then thank you... and wows, the stalkage :)

Blast From The Past

It's really fun to look back on older work. I'm disappointed that I've lost so much art over the years. I regret deleting anything I did vs. putting it in storage. Oh well, life goes on. This is what I could salvage. There's some fan characters, friends, commissions, and other general reasonless doodlins. Looking back on older work, I realize that I was pretty good at some things that I seem to kind of stink at now! It's good look back and see improvement, but it's even weirder to look back and SEEK improvement on your current work. That's usually unheard of!

Old piece that didn't fit in the compilation...and stood well on it's own.

Commission Example Page
I forgot about this! It was particularly useful, and I'm going to make use of it again! Some...kangaroo thing. Not confident what I was thinking at the time :)