Okay, so another artist I've had no grief at all with has blocked me out of the blue. I have to wonder if DA is doing a thing where if you delete a comment, it also blocks the person. I can see in my history that I commented on something of his, but the history entry is blank and there's no place where it was on the comments on the piece. (So I guess they fixed that thing.) But I can't imagine the comment was in any way offensive.
Depends on the artist. For some, if you're slightly to the right of Lenin...
It MIGHT have been because I told him he did a buckle backwards.
Ah! That kind. Like the guy who claimed to be a "master" leather-worker but didn't know how to run a guide line when I had him stencil my lifting belt.
In all other respects, he is an awesome artist, but it seems nobody is immune to drawing a backwards buckle. They get caught up in the direction of the free end of the strap, and draw the tab on the buckle going the same way.
I have a comic book where the heroine wears these thigh high boots with 23 straps apiece on them. And on every page, 20 pages, multiple panels sometimes, every single buckle on them is backwards. And nobody caught it. I can imagine how pissed someone would have to be after being told to fix such a small detail so many times.
I just verified that deleting a comment does not add someone to your block list. But the block and delete comment menu items are right next to each other. I suppose it could be accidental.
It's happened to me too; weird thing is, several times it's been someone I never even spoke to before as far as I can tell. I just go to some art they posted and get a 'blocked, cannot post your comment' message.
The reason I think it might be related to deleting a comment is that I saw some of my other comments on older works were still there. (Oddly, the one way you can get to a specific piece, even if you can't see it, is to follow the link from someone else's favorites.)
I considered asking him on Twitter, but that seems too Drama-inducing.