How and Why to Use Autovoting & Original Zodiac Dragon Art

Hello guys! How have you been? Congrats to all those who have reached their Steemit anniversary and thank you for sticking around and reading this!

Lately I’ve been very busy with work and I noticed that my SP was occasionally being wasted by staying charged at 100%. Also I had missed a few awesome posts by Steemians I follow who don't post often. I still manually upvote a lot, but that's usually on the weekends. So I started using autovotes as a backup, steemauto.com to be precise.

So I hope to motivate semi active and inactive Steemians to use their votes more effectively, even if they have little SP.

Minnows and planktons can make a difference in greater numbers. Moreover early votes add to a post's visibility, so basically a small vote is worth more if you vote sooner. Autovotes generally vote 20 min after a post is created. Many good posts are lost to never be seen after only 2 hours, not to mention a few days.

If you're too busy to make a list of people you want to upvote, you can still contribute by joining one of the several dedicated curation trails. This also applies to those worried that autovotes spoil Steemians making them work less hard, which I personally disagree with. Being valued is a great motivator and energy booster, while being constantly undervalued can make Steemians lose hope and quit.

Lastly, don't expect to get bigger reward for autovoting, that only works for significant amount of SP. So stick to voting content you enjoy, not because a poster has big payouts.

Let's get started

To sign on Steemauto you need to sign in with Steemconnect, same as most other places.

Next you can set your voting limit as shown above. The limit means, it will wait for your SP to recharge before autovoting. So if autovoting is just a backup for you, set it between 90-99%. Otherwise 80% is a good, as your upvoted lose some value below that.

Next you need to decide who to upvote. Curation trails are a great way to get started. This means you'll upvote the same posts as the Steemit account you set it to.

If you want to autovote specific Steemians then go to Fanbase. There write the usernames and set the vote %. The default is 100%. If someone posts daily, your votes may get drained fast so you may want to lower % or manually vote them. Watch out, if you set the % too low, you might vote 0,00 which doesn't benefit anyone.

Lastly it's good to set a daily limit to 1 per steemiam, as some post same post in different languages.

Everything is up to you and you can very easily adjust and change all settings.

About the Art

Cancer is the fourth zodiac sign, related to June and July months. It's main element is water.

A person whose sign is cancer are said to be symphatetic and attached to those who are close to them as well as deeply intuitive. If your sign is cancer, how well does this describe you?

For the drawing I started with some thumbnails. Thumbnails are small design sketches meant to explore different ideas easily without details. You should do thumbnails regularly, because it makes final art much easier to make and more interesting to see.

Next I took my regular Sketchbook and did a rough pencil sketch. Once I liked the shapes I took a 0.4 pen and drew all the outlines. I actually wanted to use a thicker 0.8 pen like in previous zodiacs, but I couldn't find it.

Once I finished initial outline, I thickened lines in the shadows. Any mistakes I removed with a wipe out as I can easily edit those digitally.

For the coloring I tried a slightly different method. I first filled the base red color everywhere and then added layers consistently. For the previous dragons I constantly switched between colors. Switching between colors has a better effect, but it's much harder to show steps.

I just kept layering colors softly until I liked the saturation. The advantage of soft coloring is that you can easily erase with a kneaded eraser without leaving any smudges or marks. You can't fully erase the colors, but can lighten any areas.

I tried making the red more saturated than for Aries zodiac to make them more distinct. I used some blue for the wings and the fins, because it's associated with water.