Hello everyone!

My journey here started in 2007 or '8ish when I was about 10 years old and I created this account around 2009. For years this was my favorite site, my favorite place to find exciting new games, my favorite art gallery, my favorite social media, and my favorite place to connect with other creatives. Why the heck did I ever abandon it?! Although I was too shy to use this site to its full potential back then it kickstarted my urge to create art for others to enjoy and to make a living. The advent of youtube tutorials and seeing the Newgrounds crew level up to creating professional products like Alien Hominid & Castle Crashers showed me that dedication to independently building my skills could result in a fruitful future for myself and the career that I really desired -that was like crack for a lil weird kid like me lmaooo.

I'm 28 now, I attended and dropped out of community college for art and built a small but relatively successful career creating logos, fliers, and other graphics for musicians alongside my ever-rotating day jobs. I am mentally ill, mildly physically disabled(partially herniated spinal disc), and trans, which makes finding and maintaining a normal job very difficult. Although I wouldn't survive without my husband, the income I brought in through art has helped me stay afloat financially and mentally.

So why am I considering coming back? For the past 2 years I haven't really been able to post much to my instagram, my only social media and venue for finding clients right now, because:

• I am depressed as fuck
• The pressure to post something better than the last piece has given me horrible anxiety. Dumb, I know, lol
• I've mostly been working on client work, on projects that take the client years or never come out at all
• Instagram announced that they'd be stealing our art to train AI models, something I vehemently oppose
• Begging for people to care about my art when there are genocides and bigger worldly problems feels insane

I am too broke to afford Steam games, and I'm super picky, pretty much being obsessed with only Minecraft for the past 12 years. I was too depressed to even do that and my moral OCD kicked in when Mojang announced, using AI images, that they were destroying a nature reserve in London to build a Minecraft experience park; essentially breaking me of my near-lifelong fixation.

So, on a whim, I came back here to find a low-stakes arcade game to keep my brain from turning to mush, and realized the community here is still very much alive and thriving! Coincidentally looking for a new venue for my art, looking for new games, and looking for a new way to connect with other creatives again made me realize this is the perfect site to host my gallery and spend my free time online. It has everything I need at this chapter of my life! What the hell is a BlueSky?

I am very excited to reconnect with the community here and post new art again! Even if I don't gain any traction, that's okay! As soon as I am able to afford Supporter Membership I will change my username and start posting.(having my elementary school username still is embarrassing but I don't want to abandon this OG account!)

If you want to help me support myself and accelerate my transition over to using Newgrounds as my main platform again I humbly accept donations via Venmo (@SugarRookie), and/or moral support when I do start posting new art here!

I have also created a good amount of game assets over the years, especially recently, so if you are an aspiring game dev or programmer in need of artist I would absolutely love to collaborate on a game project to post here! When I am better settled in I will make a dedicated post on that subject though haha.

My current portfolio is on insta @SugarRookie, if you wanna peep that in the meantime! But no pressure, I hate it over there lmaoo

Thank you for reading this, thank you for the hundreds of hours of entertainment, and for everything else this community has done for me. Sincerely, it means the world to me!

(Side note: please ignore my reviews and interactions that occurred when I was in middle school, I guarantee I was annoying and they don't reflect the person I've developed into over the past decade and a half)

-- SugarRookie, Bella, she/her/it/its