Power is back. Very Long Post~ (Patreon)

Power is back and I'm happy to report that me and my family are all safe. Thank you for all the well wishes, they really mean a lot especially since this typhoon is such a tragic event.

I tried to condense this but this is still a pretty long post so bear with me as I walk you through the past few months and the events leading to the decision to change the way I operate my Patreon. It's not just the patreon poll, but a culmination of a lot things, mostly internal.

I think this all started at around May-June. More people started sharing my stuff, comments came rolling in, followers increased etc etc. It's a good feeling. And it truly feels nice when your hard work is praised and recognized. But I want to focus on the comments about "improvement". Especially comments that say I'm getting better in each piece I post. They mean well and again it is a nice thing to hear, and it's not their fault at all. However, I believe that became my 'downfall'.

I like to think that I don't let comments, good or bad, get to me. But when you hear the same things over and over again it kinda lingers in your head. And at some point in my mind: praise became expectation and expectation became obligation. Over time, I've became conscious about whether what I'm drawing will meet those people's praise and I've obligated myself to rise up to those expectations. It became a constant, nagging feeling of "Is this better than my last piece?" "Am I doing something new in this piece?" "Is this going to 'wow' people?" "I hope I don't disappoint..." Meanwhile time marches on. Days, weeks and month fly by and I'm still sitting there questioning myself. Just look at the White Heart piece, I've redrawn it so many times that I don't even know anymore. I kept raising the bar higher and higher and I was burning myself out because I couldn't draw it the way I imagined it. The SFW piece is what I show on twitter and I wanted to show to my followers that I'm improving even more... but the reality is I'm just human. I'm full of flaws and I can't force or even predict improvement, all I can do is put my nose on the grindstone. But here I was, expecting I'd somehow magically come up with a masterpiece just because I wanted to!

That's really the crux of it all. It's me having unrealistic expectations of myself. The Patreon polls were just another set of expectations on top of bigger expectations. And that's why I'm stopping the polls. Being honest, I did the polls because they seemed to be working well for other artists. Learn from others, they say. But the thing is I'm not them and now that I look back on it, my heart isn't really all into it. In fact, I've gotten lazy because of the polls. After all, I just needed to draw 3 monthly illustrations and I'm good. I find myself justifying my laziness with "It's okay as long as I put out 3 amazing pieces". Amazing pieces being the keywords here, let's not go over that again. And I feel guilty that sometimes I'm spending more time on my "side-projects" rather than what is expected of me in my patreon.

When I look back at my most productive period this year (late May to early June) I was constantly putting out drawings after drawings. I think I put out more than 6 illustrations in the span of three weeks. That's an insane output and I want to put myself in a similar zone to that. I'm not trying to compete with the output, but I want to do something that I was doing back then and it is this: Just draw what I want to fucking draw. Don't care about feedback and stop thinking in terms of improvement. Remove the sense of obligation and expectation. Now this is not an excuse for me to put out shitty works because that's just distasteful and plain awful. But I think what I need is to just have unfiltered fun and perhaps more importantly be honest with myself.

In a way, I'm kind of thankful to the Typhoon because it disconnected me from my day to day routine. It forced me to just drop everything no questions asked. This gave me plenty of time to internalize. I know this might sound cliche but I've imagined the death bed scenario many times during the typhoon: "If I die today, I wish I drew more Wiz." I'm exaggerating for the sake of brevity because this post is already way too long. But you get the point, I want to do more me, like what I've written in my patreon's opening post.

And this is why I want to pursue personal art and projects. I am at my element when I'm not worrying about what people are going to think and just create freely without reservations. I honestly don't care if I succeed financially with this, because let's be honest Patreon can be a real source of livelihood. But I want to stop myself from prioritizing money over my artistic vision and mental wellbeing. I want to share art that is unique to me and if I fail, too bad, but I'll just keep trying or find other sources of income. If I succeed? Well that's putting the cart before the horse. It all boils down to this: I can't promise you that I'm going to draw a wide variety of characters or that my stuff will keep on getting better. But what I can promise you is I'm going to keep on drawing and I will do my best in my art.

I think that's all I wanted to say for now and I hope I explained my position well enough. Now I'm ready to go back and finish the August rewards and revamp my Patreon page to reflect all this. There's also the eroge talk but that really deserves another post. Will I do fanart polls in the future? At the moment my answer is a firm no.

You know, I'm glad I got this off my chest. I generally don't like talking about my feelings especially the bad ones because you'll always have down times and up times in life. I just usually let the down times pass because I generally don't want to attract or stir up drama. But in this case, I just reached a critical point and I just wanted to talk about it and I feel that you guys see me beyond my art.

Thanks for reading. I want to end this post in a lighter note because I don't like to make it completely somber. So here's a Wiz sketch! I haven't drawn the entire week so I need to do a lot of warmups and who better to draw than my beloved muse? ( ´ ω ` )