Okay, this has been a while coming.
I have no idea what on Earth has happened to this community. I've spent literally hundreds of hours making art to enhance a game you enjoy playing, and it seems that there's sadly little people who care about that. There's been some very nice feedback, definitely, and especially those couple of donations made my day. But the fact is, most of the feedback I seem to get (particularly by email) is just a collection of profanity. The messages on Kong also seem to show an alarmingly negative trend, and for a while, I was fine with that. But now that I can't even play PVP1 or PVP2 without someone bitching at me for the art I made, I've had more than enough of it.
I'll stick around painting and running Art Class once I get my PC back from the repair shop, might pop up in chat once in a while too. But on the whole.. I'm done.
Your work is awesome, and the time you invest doing this is reason enough to thank you and respect you for everything you do, I'm certain most "serious" players and forum members think this way, the problem is, the ones that troll and criticise generally scream louder than the ones who agree, so they tend to be noticed more.
Personally, I'm quite surprised at these reactions, I've only had good feedback regarding the new art (I'm mainly in Kong chat), and even though you'll always hear a "I liked the old XXX better", people seem generally satisfied.
Don't let yourself be trolled by haters, they just need a target, and you're probably one of the only "officials" of this game they can reach.