Gday it’s your mate the ol Izzy bsides, freelance porn extrodanare here. Today I want to talk about the best place to stream your nsfw art, and how to not burn out in the process.

Chapter 1: the best place to stream

Picarto!

Chapter 2: the interesting bit.

But seriously, picarto is where it’s at. You can do multistreams with other artists, commissioners are prowling everywhere looking for open slots and the emoji are friggin adorable.

The downsides to picarto is that a lot of the features you get for free on twitch are gated behind a 15 dollar a month membership plan. You can hustle someone to gift this to you though if you really miss having all your streams automatically saved, but where are you going to post them afterwards? On YouTube, good luck with that. Although last time I checked YouTube doesn’t have any official policy regarding the specifics of your inflation kink.

Originally I had a segment here about how to set up your stream. It was so boring that at one point missybsides coughed and I left it in because I was like “wow, that’s some interesting content.”
Eventually the segment got so boring that it turned into a yawn and floated away.

If you would like to know in painful detail how to set up OBS to stream your monitor to Picarto, then I’m sorry, I’m leaving that shit to some other bottom feeder.

However, if watching me feed on a bottom is something you’re interested in seeing, leave a comment below.

I need to be upfront with you. The guides that tell you how to be a successful streamer aren’t the same as how to be a good artist. Especially a good artist that doesn’t burn out in a blazing grease fire of stress.
The steps you need to take to have fun streaming are entirely personal, and you need to make these distinctions yourself. My sincere apologies for not being you.

Personally I eschew almost all of the best practices on how to be an engaging streamer so I can concentrate on my primary job, which is drawing dicks on to literally everything. When I did SFW content I used to have a greenscreen, a mic, dignity, a functional relationship with my parents. You name it. It would take forever to rig everything up, and by the time I got started drawing I’d already be tired. But then I’d keep the stream going far longer than I needed to because it took so much effort to get there in the first place. It was fun, but taxing. A piece would take far longer to do than normal cause I’d be too busy discussing Dutch cuisine with some rando in the chat.

I feel like most guides are catering toward gamers where your identical stream needs a distinction based on personality. How long and how much do YOU scream while playing Minecraft? Scream a lot if you want tweens, scream just a little if you’re targeting a more refined demographic.

As artists we’re lucky that the content we’re generating is 100% us. The way we draw a line, the way we forget which layer we’re collectively on, and how we colour all add to the texture of the stream. It’s pure personality content creation in a way.

So when you decide to get into streaming, decide where your line is, decide how much is too much, and don’t feel pressured to go balls deep on your first try. Do what makes you comfortable.

These days I open Picarto up, pop out the chat window and close the rest of the browser. Then I turn on VseeFace for my vtuber appearance and get OBS running. I have zero audio going through, except occasionally when I decide to play music. And then that’s it. I hang out on the text chat and say hello to new viewers in there, occasionally touching base with the regulars to make sure they haven’t lost any limbs since I last said hi. It’s a good chill vibe. I don’t have a stream schedule, and I don’t have dedicated times, meaning streaming has to fit around MY life and not vice versa. I also don’t feel too much pressure to keep the stream going any longer than I have to.

I don’t advertise when I’m about to stream on any other platforms, and as a consequence my stream community is unique to Picarto as they for the most part all found me organically by browsing around. I don’t want to convert my twitter followers to stream watchers, I want to convert them to either standard commissioners or Discord lurkers.

I’m not going to lie, you might have a tough time starting out streaming. Starting a new social account of any kind can be ego destroying. There’s nothing quite like the universe echoing comfortable ambivalence back at you after you’ve slaved away all evening on a new piece. This feeling can be compounded when streaming, because now you can see in real time that nobody cares about what you’re drawing.

But if streaming is always a secondary consideration to the art itself, being alone on your own stream shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s a bonus if someone shows up because that’s 100% more exposure than you would have gotten to begin with.