Being from the culture helps :P

A lot of the delish zodiac-themed items have nice stuff to complement the aesthetic. I've never paid real money for CSC, so I save throughout the year and go all out black fridays.

There are also def some CW's worth watching for, though following and understanding the market takes enough energy I'm not sure it's worth it. The native on-site items have upgraded so much they're often better than CW's now

damn @ your whole collection there i don't feel qualified to give advice (unless a specific question is asked) but your elf ones/ghost one wowwwww so creative and unique

there used to be a trend where everything was color matched perfectly and neatly tightly layered and everyones HAs looked like this....glad to see we have grown hahaha

my current one is for the 'stimulate your style' challenge which i don't actually enter but like to play along anyway [avatar=mean]

for sure!! I'm looking to make more of those HAs bc I'm Chinese actually and I've been on a big hanfu kick lately : D I feel like most of the easian stuff onsite skews more towards fantasy Japan, which is frustrating at times

I never pay for CSC either and the individual delish items all look so tiny that I can never convince myself to spend money on them lmao, but maybe next boxing day...

I think there has been so much more stuff that aesthetic is hard to achieve now/no longer that interesting, since we have so many more options. I think a lot of the native stuff is actually encouraging that sort of mix and matching--so many of the vanity sets come in these odd colors that don't resemble anything on site.

Why not enter? Your avi looks great. And $$$

Gotcha. The aesthetic is similar enough I feel like many pieces could pass either way.

For delish, I focus on pieces that do a lot for the buck and have good resell value before the next black friday. A lot of the gowns/skirts/changshan do this, and can look gender neutral enough layered under clothes. Jewelry and a few makeups I also use often (esp the uncolored/minimally colored lips). Oh, also bg's always get a high resell value.

Some faves are [item = Delish Forever Jumbo Lip Pencil]

Delish Able and Inclined are my favorite sets for how many of the individual pieces look good alone.

I also follow FWSG? I think is the acronym. They ping about discounts, and can sometimes get you delish under 3mil/vanity under 1 mil. Edit: Oh, dear, I did not mean to tag the whole group many apologies. Let me go post some cheap vanity/delish there 9 under 400k

you're right, the variety is astounding nowadays

and idk, i don't need/necessarily want the csc (i have real life money i can spend if i want to, many others don't)

to be honest i hate competition, friendly games only hahaha

That's fair. The time I spend on this game is money enough lmao

but the game is a raffle? It's not competitive like many other HA things. So the winners are always a v different variety of stuff

Also, I just realized you're the maker for many of my fave CW's on site. The window lighting one in your shop goes so far towards making a flat image look 3D, it's really well designed

That would be awesome, dooo iiit! Beards for everyone! (Also I've seen people talk about your CWs but I don't know where they are. Do you have a shop or a thread?)

That was a great HA too...I love the Egyptian animal head revamps but I haven't managed to use the ibis yet. They're so cool but they're definitely a challenge to work with.

I've been cycling through a lot of my old HAs with minor alterations lately. I keep feeling like I need a change but don't want to put the effort into making a whole new thing lol.

Somehow I got all the way through school and never had to read Catch-22. I had "cool" English teachers who let us read "fun" books like The Hobbit instead of the ones teachers usually assigned (confession: I hated The Hobbit so much, it was pure drudgery...but then, I'm not a big fan of the fantasy genre like with elves and stuff. The movies are good though). I didn't even know what Catch-22 was about until I started watching the Hulu miniseries based on it and now I'm like damn, I wish we would have read that book! I might have to go grab it from the library haha. The show is great.

Everything is better with a dog, life pro tip right there.

I'm glad this thread is gaining so much traction!

most of my ocs are ladies but i got some guys in here too, including a lot of contest incidentals...

(first is ralsei deltarune, fifth is my oc cadeus, last in second row is based on the song lemon boy by cavetown, third in last row is a hogwartssona made by my brother)

a bunch of star wars guys i made as a set once (they're dancers from different dance genres)...

(mitaka, luke, han, hux, poe, maul obi-wan, dooku, mace, krennic, galen, anakin)

and some formal huxes:

(the last one is dress bc pride and prejudice au & he's trans and also very much elizabeth to kylo's darcy)

... and thats like 90% of the guy HAs i have lol. i was paging through like nonbinary, girl, girl, girl, nonbinary... lol it doesn't help that my avatars are like at least 20% kylos

you make some wonderful boys owo

Masc AND Horror avatars? I've found my homeeee

Thanks for paging me, :)

I am usually dressed as a lady (my OC, Valiska Courinna) but I have a fair amount of male characters I like to do as avatars, too!

And yes, there are a lot of Gravity Falls characters in there (various iterations of Ford, Stan, Dipper, Bipper and Bill), but there's also an Armitage Hux, a Martin Kratt and a Jim Profit, as well as various personal OCs :)

another POC avatar fan! hi there! are you a member of the deepbase group?

I don't normally make HA's with backgrounds, but I have a few laying around:

Some other random ones I forgot I had:

I don't know if I am out of place here because I am a girl, but also you can't just give me an awesome avatar maker like Subeta's and expect me not to make a ton of cute guy avatars. Half my style-file is male HAs, lol. I wonder if people around the site think that I am a guy, with how often I have one?

I actually made a whole drawing based on one of these - here! I tend to make HAs for competitions and such because I think it's easier to deal with the huge amount of possibilities if there's a set theme or item I have to use. Actually, I should go look for another theme and make a new HA right now...

Your HAs are way too great. Flexing on us all, uh? =D

aha, I feel like does a much better job with HAs than me, though I apologize if I came across as flexing at any point

also you arent out of place for being a woman, masc is open to guys gals and nb pals from what I can see! so dont fret

OMG! That 11th HA (transparent cyber ghost) is the best thing I've ever seen, seriously! I bow to your incredible creativity! _

^.^ That's sweet~ Thank you so much~

Your HA's always have such put-together faces :o they're very expressive

I also identify as a woman lol but lots of people like male-presenting/gender-neutral styles, regardless of gender (or lackthereof)

i feel like i should shed a tear, you like my cw that much? i thought it was so simple! wow i feel blessed haha thank you so much for saying that

ive only made a very small number + 1recolor +1recolor + 1recolor

and that is all!

i'm also proud of this thread!

i would definitely recommend catch-22 as well...i wholeheartedly consider it a fun novel, much more so than the hobbit.

i didn't watch the hulu miniseries because of the white washing! the main character is assyrian, he's supposed to be middle eastern, big and brown. i saw the casting and refused lol

i know little to nothing about star wars but i so appreciate you sharing all of those....you have contributed to my inspiration!

welcome home, son (by radical face)

woah love your use of backgrounds on all your characters too! amazing job, thank you for posting and gracing us all.

all of yours have such poignant personalities. i think you're my favourite maker here ;|

of course you're welcome here! this group isn't for men only, it's for all lovers and makers of masculine HA's! I'm glad you posted. tbh it would be silly for people to assume user gender off of HA gender!

i really love that ninth one of yours...something so serene and powerful about it!

thank you so much!

I always use a background except for contest entries that require you not to. My stepmum's an art teacher and she'd always tell me when I was a kid to fill in the whole page and show what's around the subject of my work.

Plus, I like to give a sense of place, because some of these are fantasy characters and some of them are interdimensional travellers. A couple of them are recreations of scenes in the show Gravity Falls.

Besides, my Bill Cipher avatar relies on the background cutout and negative space :)

yay! i can't wait to see what else you make! :D i really like making gender non-conformative HAs, so does my brother, we put a lot of boys in skirts. we both have our own wobbly relationships with gender, and also just straight up goddamn when there's a make it gnc button we are going to be hitting it quick enough to give us whiplash. we perpetually confuse people talking about star wars bc we took at least two major characters and just what if they werent that gender tho

i dug way back in the saved avatars and found more self portaits by my brother (the hogwarts one was by me tho) :

also found some more random guys:

(feat. anakin-inspired fashion (first), mothman, my oc rory (next to mothman), and crowley goodomens (last))

more huxes because i can't be stopped (+1 poe) :

Private Outfit made another fairly masc HA for stylefile's 10 year event! they've got boobs but shh it's fine I just liked the silhouette better that way

backgrounds are really tough to work with imo. they often obscure the silhouette in a way that I don't like, and the newer ones feel weird to me because the art style doesn't match the avatar in front... it adds a lot when I can make the layering work though! the berry cordials have been a GODSEND for that honestly.

I will love you 5ever for making me realise just how badly I needed Finn in a dress.

Outfit Not Found

(I don't really consider this a male HA because kylo's Finn is trans but holy crap I have to share it anyway. Least it's on a dmab base?)