off-season events?

It makes me sad when forums go quiet... so I was wondering, are there any plans for off-season events?
(I remember back in the day the old guild did some smaller events year-round... obviously the same type of event might not work given the new format, but it would be cool to organise something to keep the forum more active year-round.) Perhaps even if it's just something like a weekly/monthly art challenge or theme, or some other type of art game-- I do see a lot of people on here saying they would like to get back into drawing more often, so getting some more art games started could be fun!

......so, anyone else have an idea? :>

I like that idea quite a bit! perhaps like, a drawing prompt every month or a thread where we can put ideas for paintings or drawings every few weeks, for the rest of the people can use as inspiration for a new picture?

like... i don't know, -example: - draw something with a boat.

^ really bad example, but hopefully you know what I mean?

someone could paint a picture of a boat floating on calm waters
others could paint the boat being attacked by sharks or monsters
someone else could be all crazy and paint a boat floating in sand instead of water, or something. lol xD

these kind of ideas could be put up monthly or something and at the end of each month or two months, we can see what everyone has drawn using that idea. /end derp.


edit-

or something using music - someone posts a song, people have to draw a picture that they come up with that song. or something.



edit 2-

or there could be a drawing prompted using a certain amount of colours for the drawing and nothing else. so you can only draw with blues reds and purples or something.

Oooh~! I like the song prompt idea! 83

Or just a monthly drawing prompt in general sounds like a good idea!

We should make it more exciting though like...

Maybe at the end of each month we can have a poll on who we though came up with the most creative idea for the prompt?

And then the winner gets to request something they'd like drawn for themselves as a prize and people who wanna draw them prizes caaan? XD Haha

Or doesn't have to beee..! I think people would be more encourage to do the prompts if there was something at stake though~

Maybe they could just win bragging rights though XD

ART IS ITS OWN REWARD U:
(also I need more variety in my portfolio; when left to my own devices I just tend to draw the same subject matter over and over xD;;; )

So maybe a monthly challenge... set? I like the idea of having multiple challenges at once... then if you REALLY want a challenge you can combine them all in one picture, or if you're fast you can draw all of them seperately!

I like the monthly-challenge idea! I'm piss poor at keeping up with things like that but I'll give it a shot. :U

I like the drawing prompt idea. Aaawhyme listed some good ones! We had a challenge thread like this in the old guild long ago, but I think it was just themes every time. So I like the idea of having a bit more variety and using songs or limited colour pallets, stuff like that. Or there could be challenges like "take an old piece of yours and redraw it". There are so many possibilities. I really like challenges that get you drawing in a way that you normally wouldn't have.

I like the idea of maybe three or so at once so you can go with whatever inspires you most, or do all three. Or like Duskglass said, you can try and do all three in one picture, that could be fun. XD

We could all submit ideas for prompts and then whoever is in charge of the thread could pick some, or use their own. (Any volunteers for this? I can give it a try, but I have a feeling there are others who could manage it better than I could haha.)

Only thing is, as sky said it would be good if people had some sort of incentive for doing the prompts, but I have no idea what that would be. I guess we can just try and have really good prompts that inspire people, and hopefully that would be motivation enough!

As for other off-season type things... I feel like I had other long forgotten ideas, so I might go browse through the old guild to see if I can find any of them. Also, you are all welcome to start your own threads if you have any ideas.

I'd be happy to handle the main post, though I'll definitely need help thinking of challenge ideas xD;;;
(another good reason for having 3 per month is that different people find different things to be challenging-- a Big Challenge for one person might be something another person draws every day, which... defeats the point of it being a challenge.)

I'm poking the old forum right now and I can't find an art challenge thread, though there was a collab thread and a thread for the 'redraw old thing' meme, both of which could be fun challenges.

as far as other things go...
- several different 'artist questionnaire' topics that gave a list of questions people could respond to and share things about their art/themselves.
- the 'discuss your original characters/stories' topics.
- birthday thread (for art gifts; could also be a general spontaneous-gift topic).
- art crit thread, but we have existing threads that can serve that purpose

Yeah I couldn't find the old challenge thread either. I think we may have deleted it because, if I recall correctly, it was pretty unsuccessful with only one or two submissions.

But like I said, that was only using themes, kind of like those 100 theme art challenges that are out there. And there was only one at a time. Maybe it will make a difference to have a variety and different types of prompts than just themes.

Artist's Questionnaires, oh yes! Selini told me she was going to do some of those here, but I guess she was busy or maybe forgot... Not sure if she still plans on it or not. I hope so because I was looking forward to those, hehe... but if not, I will gladly post some of my own. Anyone else is welcome to as well.

We actually almost had a separate subforum for writing/OCs but then we couldn't decide what to actually put in it, so we got rid of it before we made the forum public. But I agree another thread like that would be nice.

Oh yes, I wanted to make a birthday thread too, I can't believe I completely forgot about that. I like the idea of just giving gifts in general, too.

Ah! I reaaally like the birthday gift thread idea~! And the Talkin' About OCs one!

Also, I just had an idea for a possible other one - would anyone be interested in this?
I think there are other sites that are solely for this type of thing - but what it would be is sort of a "Sequential Art Story Telling" thread - Where the first post has a picture of something. Like maybe a girl and a cat. With just a small caption like "A girl stands waiting for the bus with her cat". And then the next post will be someone else who adds an illustration to continue the story. Like maybe they draw a monster now sitting besides the girl and her cat and add "A monster joins the two in their wait for the bus stop"

And then continue post by post for anyone who wants to jump in and keep the story going XD

Sky, I actually had that exact idea back in the old guild but never got around to actually trying it. Actually I remember a few people proposed ideas like that. ^^ Some people wanted to do it as an interactive comic, but I prefer the idea of a single image and a caption because it's less effort for people to keep it going.

I would love to try that. Could be really fun!

Yeah, that subforum is still there-- 'secret forum x' (though I don't think it's publicly visible). It was more of an everyone-makes-their-own-thread type of thing, but I think a few more general threads are a lot more fun-- I'd rather have a dialogue going than have my own thread where I just feel like I'm talking to myself. xD;;; I think the subforum idea died when people started posting single threads about it that did the job just as well.
(there's a really good story meme here, while we're on the topic.)

The sequential collab thing does sound pretty fun! :>

Would the birthday/general gifts thing be a single thread? (to me it seems a bit redundant to have two separate ones....)

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about "secret forum x" haha. Actually what I meant is, we had a subforum on these forums for OCs/writing, but ended up deleting it before we opened up to to the public. It was a neat idea but we couldn't think of enough content to justify a whole separate subforum for it, so we ultimately left it out for now. We were going to wait to see what others thought about it, actually... if you guys would prefer a separate forum or if an individual thread or two would be enough.

I forgot that we had pretty much done the same type of thing with the old guild as well. xD

I think a combined birthday/gift thread would work well enough. As you said, it would be a little redundant to have two separate ones. The nice thing about this forum is it keeps track of birthdays for you! Even has the nifty reminder thing at the bottom so you know when one is approaching. So unlike the old guild, we don't have to manually add everyone's birthdays in.

Might still be nice to have a list though, so people can see which bdays are coming up farther in advance. (also not everyone enters theirs in the forum... possibly because it requires you to put in the year and not everyone wants to post their age. I don't have mine listed in for that reason...) Having people submit theirs manually would also focus the list on the more active members.

I think just a few threads are fine, or even preferrable-- the advantage of each person having their own thread is that it makes your info easier to find all in one place, but personally I'd rather have group discussions than post textwalls about my stuff in a lonely personal thread.
(I was also responsible for steering the art forum away from this model <_< 'everyone post your art here!' is a lot more fun and easier to keep track of than a bunch of individual threads... I'd rather have one or two active topics than a great big list of rarely-updated ones. but on the other hand, it couldn't hurt to have a storytelling subforum, since writing stuff doesn't quite fall into the existing forums... and that way if someone did want to make a personal thread they would have space to do so.)

Hm. That's annoying that it forces you to put in a year of birth. I wonder if it is possible to change that... I'll look into it or see if Selini knows anything. I don't have a problem having a list as well, especially if someone else wants to handle that part haha. XD;

I have always been a fan of having just a few threads like that as well. I think it is easier to keep them active that way, too, since we're a pretty small community.

yeah.... and then if everyone has personal threads it's likely that some of the threads would get more attention than others, and people might feel slighted or ignored...

What we could do if there was a subforum is have different topics related to storytelling, like seperate threads for character design, writing help, general discussion, worldbuilding... how your setting deals with technology/magic... for people interested in comics, a thread for discussing paneling and page layout and flow... Having more specific topics would prompt people to talk about those aspects of their story without losing everything in a single long and rambly topic.

Yeah, that's more what I had in mind if we did create a subforum like that. We also weren't sure how many people here would be interested, though, since not everyone creates stories. Perhaps we can just start with a thread or two and then make a subforum later if there is enough interest. I really like all those thread ideas though.

Oh, I looked into the birthday thing and it doesn't look like it is possible to change that. So annoying. =\ However if anyone does want to put their birthday in their profile without revealing their age, I recommend just putting an obviously fake year, like 1800 or something. I fixed the age limit (used to be 99), so now you're allowed to be up to 1000 years old. =P

I can think of at least.... 6 people who have mentioned stories and might be interested? Not counting the less active members who have stories... (I think only one or two people didn't put their own characters in their SS request.) Clearly people do HAVE them; the real challenge is enough interest that there will be activity. And I feel like the best way to generate interest is to establish interesting topics that have a specific prompt-- when someone says 'TELL ME ABOUT YOUR CHARACTERS DUSK' my response is 'UH UHH UHHHH BUT WHERE DO I START D8' but if someone asks something specific (like 'how do you handle magic in this story' or 'how do you handle character naming/conlang' or 'what are your favourite/least favourite storytelling tropes', etc etc etc) then I can go on forever because I have a place to start... so trying to gauge interest by making a general 'talk about your stories!' topic may not be very effective xD;;;

Nooo Selini please don't disable it. T_T I love that feature! I love being able to glance at the calendar and see what birthdays are approaching. Of course we can make a list as well. ^^ But I'd be sad to see that feature go, even if not everyone uses it...

Unless, is there a way to add our own events to the calendar somehow? I think I remember trying but couldn't figure it out. That way we could add people's birthdays manually without them having to put their age in their profile.

Duskglass, I agree, having topics with prompts like that would be nice. I could talk forever about some of those things too.

Could be a combined thing, having some linearts in the first post of the collab thread? Some people might be interested in doing collabs but might be too nervous or busy to approach someone themselves, so having some stuff in there already could be fun.

(or on a more general scale, it could be a section including other types of half-finished pictures, not just linearts.)

okay, it looks like our current ideas are:
- Art Challenges
- various storytelling/writing/character-based topics (secret project X)
- questionnaires
- art memes
- Birthdays + other random gifts for people
- Sky's sequential storytelling game
- collabs + 'colouring book'

I've already started the art challenge topic, obviously xD
does anyone want to start one or two of these other topics? :> (I'll probably make some writing/story-based ones-- anyone have specific story-related topics you'd like to see that would be a good starting point?)

I'm totally down with starting that sequential story telling game~! XD

And for the writing ideas, anything that could help flesh out your characters and the world they live in. Like some world building question/game things maybe?