A big blurb (Patreon)

Heads up, long post.

So, the past few months have been really good for me, in a lot of ways. I’m working again, there’s financial stability, I’m emotionally/mentally feeling better. I have a lot less free time, sure, but I’m using my time better now. Things are different, back in the beginning of the year, things were really rocky and a lot of my plans for the future suddenly became a lot less feasible. My Patreon wasn’t being used the way I had initially wanted it. So I’ll be shifting it towards what I think is best.

Back at the beginning of the year, things were taking a toll on me. I was always tired but still trying to stay positive in a situation that wound up dragging on far longer than I had initially thought it would. It carried on for months, I felt like what I was doing wasn’t enough and that ate at me. Then we got really lucky.

Things turned around but it wasn’t easy to just “fix things”, not by a long shot. I tried to adjust and balance the two things but that just wasn’t going to happen. So, a few months ago I said I’d be stepping away, to try and sort this all out. Funny enough, I figured something out during that time. I was doing so much work on upkeeping a system that was ultimately going to fall behind, that I wasn’t doing anything else. My days were the same, day in, day out. I was falling behind because I was starting to not feel great about my art, I was beginning to hate it, actually. I was starting to want nothing to do with it.

During these past few months though, as I tried to adjust to my job, and find out what I want to do again, I learned something. I was so focused on my own work that I was missing out on the great pieces other artists have been doing, I was missing streams, I wasn’t watching tv or seeing a movie, or even reading.

Up until then, my life had become just this big game of catch up on old work and there was never anything new and there never was going to be anything new at that rate. I was never going to grow as a person or an artist if I kept working on pieces from the past, but at the same time I wanted to show that I had gotten better. It was a vicious cycle of, “oh but I can do the posing better now, let me just sketch that, then ink it, then color it.” Which you know, isn’t bad, but when you’re trying to do it for like 40 different drawings, you’re not really going to get anywhere.

So on my days off now, I would draw now and again, but then I would listen to music, watch a show, kind of just be a person again. I could go on about this but let’s get to the crux of the issue ahead. What is going to happen to this Patreon account? 

Well, I will not be drawing as much as I was trying to get myself to do before, BUT, big but, I am drawing better content now that I’m not constantly scraping on empty. Originally this Patreon account was only supposed to be to show my work, there was only supposed to be the one tier. But things have to change, and speaking of changes….