A New Beginning (Patreon)

Hey folks, I hope your summer (or winter, for those down under) is going well for you. 

The announcement of the month is that we may have potentially found a new artist. She's a local friend of ours and she's currently training in Shakie's style. Having an artist this close to us would really solve our hands, as we can avoid issues like her vanishing without trace in the future again. Now the deal is not 100% set in stone yet; we'll have to see if her art is as high quality as we're looking for before officially hiring her, but both her and us are positive that she can make it. Having a fulltime artist like that back on the team would really kick us back to the good old release schedule, which would be a very nice change of pace after such a slow and frustrating year.

Now, in the case that our friend can't actually keep up, the plan B would be to hire someone from Deviantart again. We already have some people in mind and have been in contact with them, so things should go smoothly either way. Having a long-distance artist like Shakie once more would of course bring the same danger of ghosting again, but if we can't find a local replacement, we won't really have a choice.

Speaking of Shakie, she has once again vanished very soon after her return in June. My heart goes out to her, but I can't hide my frustration with this situation. We'll still be able to provide work for her when/if she returns, but a replacement is the only option left at this point.

As for AI art, we have trained a couple of models in Shakie's style and you can see the result above. This is still just a cherry-picked example and the results aren't always great, so we're still trying out new Loras and whatnot (now in the new SDXL1.0 branch). Unfortunately none of us are very experienced at this and my VRAM is just 8gb, which makes training very time consuming, so if you have good knowledge on the subject feel free to PM us any tips on trying to recreate a style/character as faithfully as possible. Again, this is just a bandaid solution until we have a good artist back on the team.

Thank you for reading. Cheers.