Yep, that’s exactly the sentiment I saw in people’s writing, that email has become almost centralized in practice, even though in theory it’s not. I saw this also generalized, that even successfuly promoted distributed/federated protocols still face the constant risk and challenge of becoming centralized in practice, when a major player manages to capture the majority of the field.

AFAIU, even Mastodon community needs to (and does) purposefully work on promoting alternative instances, so that not everybody ends up on mastodon.social…

FWIW, from what I read, the difficulty in selfhosting email is mainly in how to not get your outgoing mail insta-plonked by increasingly fussy and moody spam filters. Shows up that a huge percentage of receivers are now on gmail, trailed by a few other major players like M$, and you’re on their whimsy, with no way to appeal plonk decisions (and challenging to even find out if they plonked or not). This was reported so even before the era of “AI”, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were even harder now.

What I’d say, is don’t worry and don’t get discouraged. I’m sure there must be photographic memory artists, but a question is what you want to achieve. You can still be a great artist without photographic memory, there were, are, and will be many. For sure not every artist has photographic memory. Also, with training you will start unblocking skills and talents in your brain that you didn’t expect before you might have. I couldn’t sing well, I was unable to match a tone, but I loved singing (uh) and started learning and gradually got to a level where I could lead a voice or sing it alone in a church choir and heard compliments from various singers. Now I’m learning to paint watercolors since 2 years, and unexpectedly to me my line drawing also starts improving. Often I am frustrated by my drawings or paintings but sometimes I am surprised how this or that one somehow looks so good! Sometimes feeling not under my control if ends up good or bad 🤷‍♂️ I went into it with the same attitude as you: let’s just keep practicing, with time it must start slowly improving. Well, it does! Annoyingly glacially slowly (at least in my perception), but definitely does. There will be always “better” artists; but you start discovering that you have a different voice, a different eye, and there are people who honestly resonate with your artworks, even if you feel yours are “worse”. Not everyone, but some do. And not every piece, but some. (I literally had a friend single out one drawing as something she really liked, completely unprompted, when before a “learned artist” grilled me over it so much that I lost desire to draw for half a year.) This also gives some validation, and helps persevere through those who complain or say nothing, or who say nice but only to be nice.

nice! out of curiosity, do you have a link to the original maybe?

The top one is a koh-i-noor pencil, a short one, with the original lead so probably HB. I also sometimes use a 0.9mm 2B instead.

The bottom one is a UniPin brush pen (black).

I enjoy both quite mich - the pencil mainly for being so cute 😅 and the brush pen feels super cool to use. I also like to just write with it, for example page titles in my notes.

Thanks! And good luck, I support this idea! 🙂

thanks! :)

wow, amazing! 🤩 is this watercolor maybe? or digital art?

I’m not 100% sure, but you could try Brandon Sanderson’s “Skyward” and other books/stories in what’s apparently called “Cytoverse” series. I didn’t read them yet, that’s why no promises, but I’ve read his “Cosmere” books - those are not really sci-fi though, more fantasy/steampunk (depending on sub-series) - and I found a lot of Christian themes in there. To the extent that I sincerely found some to be helpful for my faith development (even if I’m of a different denomination). I wouldn’t be surprised if he put some such themes in his other books too.

As for CS Lewis, I had no idea he has any sci-fi books - I’ll have to find them now! He’s definitively a very Christian topics writer.

Thanks!

None that I’m aware of. I’d love to learn also if there is! I wonder now, could it make sense to try and create one? I have absolutely zero experience how this works 🤔 I’m totally new at Lemmy first of all… Should there be some minimal group of people interested in a topic to make it sensible to create a community? From the looks of it, even the artshare one doesn’t appear too crowded, so I’m not very sure there would be even anyone to take part in an ATC one? Maybe for starters it could be enough to just share any ATCs here on artshare? 🤔 Do you have some thoughts or experience on this?

Thank you! <3

Thank you so much for the kind words! <3

Nice, this guide looks super cool, thanks! I saw two others before, they seem more or less saying the same: https://jenivievedesign.substack.com/p/artist-trading-cards-etiquette-101 via reddit faq, and a cool zine at: https://www.betty-draws.de/2026/07/15/atc-zine-07-2026

The explanation in a sibling comment looks great: https://www.tinteddy.com/introduction-to-atcs-what-are-artist-trading-cards

Another one I saw before, kinda official FAQ of the relevant subreddit, is at: https://jenivievedesign.substack.com/p/artist-trading-cards-etiquette-101

Another cool one I saw is the zine about ATCs: https://www.betty-draws.de/2026/07/15/atc-zine-07-2026

In shortest words, it’s hand-made cards you do in 2.5x3.5in size (6.4x8.9cm) in any medium you like. (It’s a standard “trading cards” size, like Pokemon or MTG or baseball cards in the USA, so you can easily store them in plastic sleeved catalogs.) You can then swap them with other artists, in person or over the internet, or just keep them for yourself. They are not to be sold (if you want to sell, you mark them as ACEO rather than ATC, it’s the same size but a different, adjacent community and idea). There are online (and I think also offline) communities for swapping or just showing your collection.