Arguably the most e-famous bit of digital art I've ever made is not art, it's a character expression template: a bunch of squares labeled with different moods for other people to draw their characters in for practice. I made it in a fit of exasperation because I was hunting for interesting templates and all the results were uselessly generic and vague: lots of "happy" and "mad" and "sad" which, come on! Get SPECIFIC, name emotions that suggest you're capturing a moment. So that's what I made.
A thing I noticed during this unsuccessful hunt was that a lot of templates floated disembodied in the Image Search Results void, divorced from origin or creator. This isn't exactly a crisis (it's a bunch of boxes with usually-generic emotions noted down, a wheel which is not hard to reinvent) but it did pose something of a problem if I found a good one that was already filled out: unless the artist linked back to the blank template, I had no hope of figuring out where they got it from. So when I made mine I took the time to stick "template by [handle] on deviantArt, [year]" near the top.
And then it inexplicably escaped containment straight onto Twitter, a website I don't use and one furthermore set up to be as wretched as possible for tracking stuff down. I still don't know how or why it did. I only found out this was the case when a handful of strangers backtracked to the original deviantArt post to link their filled out copies for my benefit. I'd still love to find out the how/why, but unless Twitter wants to mail me a web map of related tweets I don't think I ever will, so I'm just grateful to the strangers who made the effort to come show me their results.
(Another statistic I wish I had was the % of Twitter participants who made that trek to come tell me they'd done it. It feels reasonable to assume less than 100% of people filling it out troubled to flag me down on the green hellsite (derogatory) which means even more people did it than I know about... but how much less than 100%? Was it 95%? 50%? 10%? 1%? I will never know, but I do wonder.)
Anyways, I consider this one of the funniest object lessons in "writing your name on art is good for letting people source it later" as well as reminding me that shit doesn't stay put on the internet. It's been years and I still get an unsteady trickle of notifications that yet another stranger added the template to a collection, month after month. This particular chost was occassioned by someone posting the filled-out result, which is rarer (for obvious reasons, lmao) but still happens every so often. I am legitimately excited whenever I see another one because the results are always REALLY good! The characterization people put into their chosen subjects is consistently great, which says nice things about all of those strangers' drawing skills but is also probably proof that I did a decent job coming up with ideas. *fistpump of victory*
