Good bye 2022 +recap long text (Patreon)

Final drawing!! I still gotta do the variants for the poll winners but dont worry lol they're coming, timelapse also coming etc etc etc

It's been quite a year! Originally I was not as happy with how things went, mainly because I intended to have started the Taifau Cafe comic already, or done some other short one shot or just sooooomething, but besides the 6 page comic and the couple of pages with Cocoa, the rest of the comic related work was either silly jokes or drafting lol... but once I started realizing why I didn't have time to fully commit it really put things into perspective for me.

It's been a while since my last long text post but hey I didn't make too many this year so beat with me not shutting up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For starters the Patreon anniversary events were quite fun!! I didn't expect the amount of entries that both contests got, but I was very happy about it. That also marked the start of doing traditional work more often and looking into physical stuff to sell/ship! The Doko plushes were just the start, the sample for the Krea plush you've seen around also got made this year! A few very small ones are being made as well... I hope I am able to show them during January! Which character will it be? You will want to squish it is the only clue you'll get, you have to guess!

I'm looking forward to see if I can do something special like this for the next anniversary!

On the merch topic I also was able to table at a con after like 2 years! All the prep work and what I gained out of it was not worth it at all lmao, but it was still a lot of fun to see old friends and meet a couple of new artists. The highlight of this was to be able to do custom keychains for some of you! I am very happy that they all arrived safely and in time (for the most part...............) 

I really want to do more physical stuff.... I like collecting a lot lol being able to hold things in your hand that normally exist only digitally is the coolest thing to me!! Especially when it's handmade like the Doko plushies lol, they are all unique in small ways.... I'm thinking of opening a new limited Tier for merch exclusively, but we shall see what happens! (current Tier 4 will get all the merch+sketch as usual, the new one will be just merch lol)

I think it would be fun to every so often draw one of the poll winners (probably the SFW one) in watercolors and ship it out to a Patron randomly! Or perhaps to the one who suggested said character? I don't know, but I think it would be a cool idea and another push to do more traditional work. If you think this would be cool let me know!

I'm not sure exactly how many unique drawings I made, (by that I mean like, no variants lol) but the Tier 2 Mega folder has very shockingly 248 drawings!! That's a lot and not even including dumb doodles, R18 stuff or traditional works.... How many of them are actually finished pieces? I don't know and I don't really wanna count em lol, they're all presentable enough so that's what counts!

The plans for the near future are for sure focus on the damn comic!! Once I'm all caught up with the very few commissions I have and late Patreon rewards I'm shifting to working mostly on it, I want to do way less commission work and hopefully balance it out with merch. Patreon rewards and polls will continue as normal.

My goal is to have chapter 1 done at the latest during March, the sooner the better, but the almost non stop work since con prep seems like it finally caught up to me and I just feel very tired lmao..... So as much as I'd like to, I'll try my best to balance my work/life with it, it's tough to not wanna overwork when you love what you're doing!! 

After that I'm not sure if I'll take a small break from it to work on a couple of other one shots (one of them should be R18!) or if I happen to have chapter 2 by the time 1 is out I'll try my best to balance work on all 3. (or just 2, the R18 isn't drafted out yet while the other one is) Everything is up in the air and not set in stone but I really want to work on comics!!!!

I would also like to make my own website and newsletter! It's been something I've been meaning to do, but I want to be relatively work free from comms/rewards to focus on doing a site, while I do know a little bit of HTML and that should be enough for something relatively simple it takes aaaall of my brain power to actually focus... If something has a lot of words and no pictures I have a hard time focusing lol <:o)

Thankfully a newsletter is easy to set up, I just want to make a nice picture to advertise it lol

On a personal note I am surprised at my improvement on drawing both digitally and traditional! 

Digitally I thought I would sliiiightly stagnate since I was "good enough" where I wasn't intentionally looking to learn more and would just put my knowledge into practice, I guess it's the benefit of being able to learn through observation lol, I think my coloring skills got better by a decent ammount! I think it especially shows on muted drawings like the ones Krea has shown up, those are my favorites from the year (no bias at all). I owe it all to looking at a lot of photobooks of models and food lol

And for traditional I got into watercolors and the results turned out surprisingly good? The few times I got to use them were mostly at school and I wasn't very good at em, I haven't practiced since so I don't know what happened buy hey I'm pretty competent at them!! lol, though I do want to set time aside to actually study with them. Watercolors are a lot of fun and my eyes tend to get tired from looking at the screen so much, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to branch out

And I think that's all I have to say about this year and the future! I don't like planning ahead too much let alone to publicly announce it, when outside factors get in the way and said plans don't get realized the way I expected I end up disappointing myself and others..... I prefer to just see where the wind takes me with some vague ideas of where I'd like to be lol.

Thank you all so much for another year of support!! Cliche ass but things really wouldn't be the same without you all, not just due to financial reasons, but through your interactions with fun suggestions, all the cool ass entries for the contests or even just bullshitting around in the Discord server lol. I hope to be able to keep making drawings that you can enjoy for as long as I can, thank you so much for everything!!