Note: this about section breaks immersion. Click to view
The internet is wide, vast, and interconnected. But we never seem to acknowledge just how quickly things can disappear.
People who were once friends never come online again, art or sites for art being in jeopardy and disappearing in the blink of an eye.
Users being second place to whatever the algorithms and shareholders think they want.
It can make the internet feel a bit lonely or sad.
It's become increasingly more apparent as the net has shifted focus to social media and all that this entails.
Plus with issues like the Internet Archive's legal battles, the future of what historical archives of the net do exist feel uncertain.
Why doesn't the internet feel fun anymore?
Back to the topic of leathersaurs, what happens when a character is no longer being used? How many creative and beautiful designs end up gathering dust in a long forgotten furaffinity gallery or deactivated deviantart account?
With the advent of toyhou.se, designs can easily be traded and kept track of. A character you like can be favourited and revisted over and over again.
But what about the ones who never made it there? Fell through the cracks. Like a design drawn once and then forgotten, or an adopt that never ended up selling.
Sometimes they did have love and talent poured into them at one point in the past,
but when the links break... and they will break... you can't exactly go and reupload all the art ever made of someone else's character.
Even if they're not being drawn or posted about in years, perhaps even going on decades, it still is technically stealing.
As someone with autism who struggles with emotional and empathy regulation, I became obsessed with the plight of the leathersaur.
Once on track to become like the little brother of the dutch angel dragon or the wickerbeast,
this species faded from the public conscious not long after their original creator sold the rights when his art interests shifted.
And the production of leathersaur adopts ceased.
But that didn't change how there had been so many incredibly designed leathersaurs out there already, and how very few of them were still getting art or love. How so many would be gone from the net if just one website went under.
This legitimately made me very very sad, so I decided to set out and try and collect as many of these guys as I could, intending to provide a place where they all could be admired and enjoyed until the end of time.
Toyhou.se didn't feel like enough, or permanent enough for my liking. So I built Leathersaur Lake, it's a bit like a petpage if you remember those.
Any of my leathersaurs here can be freely drawn without asking me for additional permission so long as the art is safe for work* and does not promote bigotry or abuse.
I am still seriously seeking out any leathersaurs you may have that you are no longer using, and am particularly invested in tracking down any of the official Clown-Grin designs
as these have become nearly impossible to find.
These are some of my favorite character designs out there and I want to bring them back online in all their glory. I will not let the leathersaur go extinct.
This species legitimately helped me get back into art after a period of grief following the loss of my service dog and I want the world to appreciate my special little guys as much as I do.
Leathersaur Lake is a love letter to all the starving neopets with custom petpages, unarchived geocities homesites, those little pixel art dragons you used to find on people's pages or forum signatures, and every forgotten OC or imaginary friend. Online or otherwise.
*(exceptions may be made to the SFW rule such as for people I know. Such images will not be shared on Leathersaur Lake.)