Hey, I Didn't Have The Motivation To Make A Full Illustration Or Do Anything The May The 4th, But Wanted

Since a lot of you have been asking about the name of the clone commander and the legion serving with Qui-Gon Jinn during the Clone Wars, meet Commander Dust and the 580th.

concept: fives and echo decide to pull a prank on Rex not too long after they become 501st. They decide to go for the obvious: pink hair dye in his shampoo.

Everything works out the way they want, they get the dye in undetected, Rex uses it without realising and ends up with a bubblegum pink buzz cut.

So he comes out of the shower and Fives and Echo are giggling and pointing, except none of the other brothers around are even batting an eye and that includes Rex, who’s now standing in front of the mirror shaving.

The twins look around all confused as their Captain puts on his armour and gets ready as though it’s just another Tuesday.

When he walks out Fives whispers “What the fuck?” and finally one of the older troopers decides to explain:

“Pretty much every rookie we’ve ever gotten has pulled the hair dye prank on Rex. Personally, I went with green. He doesn’t really care because he shaves it once a week anyway. Also, pink isn’t the most original choice.”

Meanwhile at the mess, Rex is sitting down for breakfast and reports with Cody.

“Tano again?”

“No, the shinies from last week.”

“Hm. And they went with pink?”

“Yeah, I thought they were more creative than that. You still want ‘em?”

Commander Fox, 1G, fistfight with god?

you ok there bro

If Fox is smiling the vibes are ominous I do not make the rules. Thanks for playing, Nom!

Rex deserves a steaming cup of caf, they all deserve to be happy lil guys without any worries. no worries, just caffeine.

 I think I might do a series of caf clones since I had fun doin both this one and  my sketch of Wolffe.  

pot, kettle.

Red-handed

Cody: CONFESS!

Obi-Wan: What?

Cody: CONFESS, KENOBI!

Obi-Wan: But-

Cody: RIGHT.NOW.

Obi-Wan: OKAY, I LOVE YOU!!!

Cody:

Obi-Wan:

Cody: So, it wasn’t you who stole my caff?

fresh tattoo vibes

[Image ID: Digital illustration of ARC Trooper Fives from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He is in profile, his face tattoo freshly weeping down his face. End ID.]

Repurposing GAR armor towards the end of pulverizing wrinkly Sith

— A guide by CC-1010, ecstatically-ex-marshal commander of Coruscant

A what-if au featuring the Corries pulling all-nighters fueled on caf alone to study republic law, Fox providing his own dubious legal representation resulting in the wildest civil court case in Republic history, and, they can only pray, formidable and clandestine cooperation within GAR high command’s clone contingents via a small-scale GAR-approved candy brand

Has been super fun to use so far, this is a very informative post about it.

Some thoughts on Cara

So some of you may have heard about Cara, the new platform that a lot of artists are trying out. It's been around for a while, but there's been a recent huge surge of new users, myself among them. Thought I'd type up a lil thing on my initial thoughts.

First, what is Cara?

From their About Cara page:

Cara is a social media and portfolio platform for artists. With the widespread use of generative AI, we decided to build a place that filters out generative AI images so that people who want to find authentic creatives and artwork can do so easily. Many platforms currently accept AI art when it’s not ethical, while others have promised “no AI forever” policies without consideration for the scenario where adoption of such technologies may happen at the workplace in the coming years. The future of creative industries requires nuanced understanding and support to help artists and companies connect and work together. We want to bridge the gap and build a platform that we would enjoy using as creatives ourselves. Our stance on AI: ・We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation. ・In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily.

Should note that Cara is independently funded, and is made by a core group of artists and engineers and is even collaborating with the Glaze project. It's very much a platform by artists, for artists!

Should also mention that in being a platform for artists, it's more a gallery first, with social media functionalities on the side. The info below will hopefully explain how that works.

Next, my actual initial thoughts using it, and things that set it apart from other platforms I've used:

1) When you post, you can choose to check the portfolio option, or to NOT check it. This is fantastic because it means I can have just my art organized in my gallery, but I can still post random stuff like photos of my cats and it won't clutter things. You can also just ramble/text post and it won't affect the gallery view!

2) You can adjust your crop preview for your images. Such a simple thing, yet so darn nice.

3) When you check that "Add to portfolio," you get a bunch of additional optional fields: Title, Field/Medium, Project Type, Category Tags, and Software Used. It's nice that you can put all this info into organized fields that don't take up text space.

4) Speaking of text, 5000 character limit is niiiiice. If you want to talk, you can.

5) Two separate feeds, a "For You" algorithmic one, and "Following." The "Following" actually appears to be full chronological timeline of just folks you follow (like Tumblr). Amazing.

6) Now usually, "For You" being set to home/default kinda pisses me off because generally I like curating my own experience, but not here, for this handy reason: if you tap the gear symbol, you can ADJUST your algorithm feed!

So you can choose what you see still!!! AMAZING. And, again, you still have your Following timeline too.

7) To repeat the stuff at the top of this post, its creation and intent as a place by artists, for artists. Hopefully you can also see from the points above that it's been designed with artists in mind.

8) No GenAI images!!!! There's a pop up that says it's not allowed, and apparently there's some sort of detector thing too. Not sure how reliable the latter is, but so far, it's just been a breath of fresh air, being able to scroll and see human art art and art!

To be clear, Cara's not perfect and is currently pretty laggy, and you can get errors while posting (so far, I've had more success on desktop than the mobile app), but that's understandable, given the small team. They'll need time to scale. For me though, it's a fair tradeoff for a platform that actually cares about artists.

Currently it also doesn't allow NSFW, not sure if that'll change given app store rules.

As mentioned above, they're independently funded, which means the team is currently paying for Cara itself. They have a kofi set up for folks who want to chip in, but it's optional. Here's the link to the tweet from one of the founders:

And a reminder that no matter that the platform itself isn't selling our data to GenAI, it can still be scraped by third parties. Protect your work with Glaze and Nightshade!

Anyway, I'm still figuring stuff out and have only been on Cara a few days, but I feel hopeful, and I think they're off to a good start.

I hope this post has been informative!

Lastly, here's my own Cara if you want to come say hi! Not sure at all if I'll be active on there, but if you're an artist like me who is keeping an eye out for hopefully nice communities, check it out!

cara.app

YukiPri (@yukipri) | Cara - Artist Social & Portfolio Platform

Illustrator. I just want a place to post my art in peace🥲