New Fursona Gallery

17 January 2025

A preview of my new sona gallery.

Hi folks, just a small update that I've made a new page featuring art of my fursona: Billie Hellgnoll! The old page is still available too, accessible at the bottom. You can always find a link to the page by clicking the scrungly Billie on my landing page.

Behind the scenes

The page itself is all manually written, from the layout to the CSS to each individual image frame. I could've possibly written a tool to do this, but I figured that new art of my sona is infrequent enough that it wouldn't be a huge time save.

Thumbnails

The one aspect I have automated thoroughly is the generation of thumbnails which are used in each frame of the gallery. I'm using a simple PowerShell script to pass each image through ImageMagick and produce a minimized thumbnail to use.

ls "*.png" | % {
    $bn = $_.BaseName
    magick.exe convert $_ `
        -colorspace RGB `
        -resize 320x240> `
        -dither FloydSteinberg `
        -colors 64 `
        -colorspace sRGB `
        "$bn.min.png"
}

I use dithering and color reduction to minimize the size of the output thumbnails.

For pornographic images, I add a content warning to each image in an automated way as well. I rename the image to something alike image name_content warning.png and this alternate script grabs that second half and turns it into overlaid text.

ls *.png | % {
    $bn = $_.BaseName;
    $cw = ($bn -Split "_")[1];
    magick $_ `
        -colorspace RGB `
        -resize 320x240> `
        -blur 0x24 `
        -fill white `
        -stroke red `
        -pointsize 32 `
        -gravity center `
        -annotate 0 "R18\n$cw" `
        -dither FloydSteinberg `
        -colors 64 `
        -colorspace sRGB `
        "$bn.min.png";
}

As I've gotten much better at drawing pixel art and the amount of images featuring Billie increases, there are also a number of images where I simply output the raw pixel art and directly embed it in the page, and then export a larger upscaled version which you can see when you click on it. This is basically the easiest solution to work with at the moment, although I've also considered using more dynamic methods to show off larger versions of each image.

There are a lot of dynamic options for art galleries to be used on sites, that I find basically all of them to be a little too much work compared to what I need. I wouldn't be upgrading this page more than once or twice a month, and it is easier on my end to write some HTML than maintain any kind of dynamic app page.

I have thought about running some sort of small-scale booru for my friends and their artwork. Slime Global and my private Discord are both spaces I could maintain a booru for people on, but it would be pretty hard to justify the overhead of running a booru for myself alone.

The biggest advantage or running a booru is that I could have an online repository of all my own artwork as well, which is admittedly pretty attractive. Right now between Mastodon and my year-end round-up I feel like I have a pretty decent archive, but it's certainly not the most convenient, especially now that Cohost is dead. I was a diligent tagger of my artwork on Cohost. I think for many of us, the loss of Cohost still stings.

If you're a friend of mine, or a slime global user, and you would feel it beneficial to have access to a booru where you can upload and share your artwork and artwork of your sonas/OCs, drop me a line!