From the age of 11, I spent a lot of time on online RPG forums. I started on the Warner Bros official Harry Potter forums and though the site was basic in the beginning, it quickly evolved. Before long, people could have picture signatures and icons attached to their profiles. Threads started popping up where photoshop hobbyists and designers would accept commissions.

As the Warner Bros forums started to die down and people began to move to individually hosted forums (first Proboards and eventually Invisionboard), the need for forum graphics only grew.

Before long, the Red Carpet Rebellion (RCR) forum was created. It was a place where people could go and learn to use different photo editing software. There were tutorials, battle threads, resources and staff on hand to help out. Every member posted a portfolio to be graded, and would then be assigned a rank. You could ask for monthly reviews to try to move up in the ranks and as you did, you gained access to more exclusive parts of the site.

Though they officially closed in 2015, you can still find the last version of the forums.

In its height, RCR had tens of thousands of members connecting from all over the world to engage with its platform.

And I was one of them!

I recently found a hard drive with some of my earlier work, and it got me thinking about those days.

My parents used to joke that I was the family vampire, spending all the daylight (and non-daylight, to be fair) hours in my bedroom in front of my laptop screen. The reality is that I was learning a lot in that time.

Much like how my time on the Neopets boards in the years before that helped teach me my first lessons in HTML and CSS, online RPG introduced me to photo editing and eventually video editing, hobbies I still enjoy today. See mom and dad, it was time well spent in the end!

I thought it would be fun to share some of the digital artwork I’ve made over the years, and a blog post talking about RCR seemed a great way to do it.

So without further ado, here's a walk down memory lane:

Larger blended artwork and wallpapers

Site banners

Forum signatures

Logo work