Hello DragonAceSg7, nice to meet you! It's sad that that sort of things happened to you on other sites, the internet can be a scary place. I'm glad that you feel safe here though, I'm fond of this place myself. Hopefully it'll help you feel comfortable enough to start posting and making more again soon.

To BogusRed, it's neat that you put up a livestream, though sorry I missed it. I only get online a few times a day, and the stream fell squarely outside of those! Don't worry about seeming awkward, it happens to all of us. It might help if you have a loose outline for what you're going to say beforehand. It would be less clunky than notes, and for those moments when you're unsure what to say, you can briefly glance at it and see where to go next. As long as you don't follow it like a gps, it can help a lot with talking to an audience!

I think that the community and self improvement are great aspects to focus on. The community is a large part of why I like paperdemon so much- people go out of their way to comment on one another's art, even if it doesn't fall into their niche of interest, which feels so welcoming. On larger art sites that doesn't really happen- the only ones who have a dialogue going on are either personal friends or artists with hundreds of followers. It's particularly bad for original artists like myself, since people don't want to take the time to learn about new characters and worlds, but instead flock to fan artists, who often are no better or worse than yourself but are vastly more popular.

Providing resources is also great, since it gives people a steady place to look when they're hoping to get better at some aspect of art instead of having to dig through other places to find what they want. Further, sometimes things pop up that someone didn't think about previously, which can lead to them improving in aspects they didn't expect. Something like that happened to me with one of the past articles. It was about story boarding for animations, which wasn't something that hadn't occurred to me before, and I decided to use it in the animation I currently am working on, which helped.

I'd say more about the red curtain except I'm a very SFW artist and would have pretty much nothing to contribute about that discussion, but I think it's great that it's an option for those who participate in that sort of thing. I greatly appreciate the filter system!