TKLFest 2022 Presentation Part 3 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I'm at TKLFest 2023 in Orlando right now and I'm having a fantastic time. I'm putting on another presentation this year, but I didn't want to just rehash the one I did last year over again. So for anyone who missed 2022's slideshow, I'm reposting it here again as a series of open posts that anyone can access.

TKLFest 2022 presentation Part 3:

When I first began to think about making tickling drawings again around 2007, my idea was to try to draw for MyFriendsFeet but Richard Ivey convinced me that I should just start my own site. He put me in touch with the man who did his web design, programming and updating. I put together the basic look of the site itself, and the web guy handled the rest.

I launched the site in 2007 and it provided weekly tickling art content until 2012. I wound up bringing on a team of artists besides myself because I'm not the fastest artist in the world and I also thought people would like to have a variety of styles to look at. Each artist had their own gallery of drawings and the update roster would rotate week to week. By the end of the site's run we had more than 600 drawings posted.

Unfortunately, because of the amount of money and people involved in putting a site together back then, AchillesHeelArt mostly broke even. I was paying my web guy, a billing company, a hosting company and all of the other artists. I had a core group of loyal subscribers who loved the content but I had difficulty attracting more and sales plateaued. Social media was still in its infancy at that time, so it wasn't as easy to spread the word as it is today.

In the last year that the site was online I decided to add a straight section with m/f, f/m and some f/f drawings to see if I could attract a straight audience to keep things afloat. I figured there were a lot more straight tickle fetishists in the world than gay ones so, if bringing them aboard could save the site, it was worth a try. Sadly, that didn't work either. When I made the decision to close down, Richard offered to fold the site into MyFriendsFeet so that the content wouldn't disappear entirely.

And now we jump ahead another 10 years. In that time period, I lost the job I'd had in Baltimore for 11 years. The founder retired, an evil corporation bought our company, dismantled us and I was laid off. I made the decision at 40 to move to New York City. I wound up developing a successful career as a freelance illustrator there and managed to get some amazing work.

Then something called a "global pandemic" happened. The freelance clients who had been giving me steady work completely disappeared. I had nearly a year where there was very little money coming in and I was getting pretty desperate. When I asked Richard how MyFriendsFeet was doing, it turned out that adult content is pretty pandemic-proof. When people are trapped at home they jerk off a LOT.

Another thing that had changed in the 10 years since my first site was the advent of platforms like OnlyFans and Patreon. Now you no longer needed to hire multiple people to put a site together, you could simply sell your work through a self-contained site that was essentially a blog behind a paywall.

I made the decision to get back into making the drawings out of necessity first, but I did realize that I'd missed doing them. This time around, because it is just me and there is very little overhead, there is actual money coming in and each and every one of your memberships carried me through the pandemic. I thank all of you for that.

At the end of the TKLFest presentation I showed some samples of the kind of work I'm producing on the site, such as the various celebrity and cartoon characters that I've been drawing. I also broke down my most recent drawing of the Duke Boys to show the process behind the line work, coloring and shading for every piece I draw.

And that was the end of the presentation! I got a lot of feedback from guys at the Fest, especially from the "old guard" attendees, that my slides were a wonderful trip down memory lane for them, and that they were glad I'd told some of the younger folks about what it was like for us in the days before the internet made everything so much easier.

Hope you enjoyed this!