Upcoming Plans and Changes for 2021 (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

This is a good time to update you with some of my plans for next year. I’ve got a bunch to talk about so this’ll be a bit of a wall of text. Quick summary: I’m taking next week off from art. And next year I’ll be changing my posting schedule to two to three days a week, instead of five or six.

First off, I’ve decided to take next week off from art entirely. I’ve taken time off from commissions this past year to work on things like developing Patreon. And while that was a lot of fun and really helped me out a lot, I haven’t taken any time off from art completely. In years past I often take a week off around cons, but there were no cons this year, and there was no where else to go anyway. So I haven’t taken any actual time off. I really just need a mental break—no art, no obligations. Just time off. I may still post some things I’m working on, but I’m not going to be sticking to a schedule or worrying about getting work done.

Secondly, I’m going to be changing my Patreon posting schedule. For the past year or so, my goal has been to post every weekday, five days a week and taking the weekends off. I’ve hit it nearly every week too! But I’m going to be changing that to two days a week, Monday and Thursday, with and extra floating day depending on what I have done.

My goal has always been to post regularly, but what I’ve noticed has been happening is that I’ll often interrupt my flow on a complicated piece just to spend some time on a quick sketch in order to have something to upload for that day. Posting every week day means that unless I have a bunch of sketches saved up, it’s hard to focus on more complex projects over the long term. It’s not so much of a problem if I’m doing commissions because I usually can get 5 or 6 done a week anyway, so I just post them as they’re done and that fills up a week. But when I’m working on my own projects, it’s a real struggle to keep up with daily posting and as a result I feel my work suffers.

One of my goals for 2021 is to focus on improving certain aspects of my art that I feel I haven’t worked on in a while, because they’re too time consuming. One of these is digital painting. I’d like to try new techniques I’ve seen others use, and make use of a greater variety of brushes, along with just improving in general. Digital painting however takes quite a long time—up to 20+ hours for a single image with multiple characters, backgrounds etc. If I’m putting that much time into one image, it can be really difficult to do enough other interesting pictures to fill out the week. I’ve also really been wanting to do more with backgrounds—more pics with backgrounds, more detailed backgrounds and just more practice with environments. But again, that takes time. And I find I often just finish a figure and post it because I “have” to post something, and I don’t get to polish the picture or explore it as much as I’d like.

And of course, nobody is holding me to that goal, other than myself. I’ve subbed to about a dozen other Patreon accounts this past year, and honestly none of them even really come close to the number of updates with unique images every day that I post. I’ve really been wondering if I’m busting my ass trying to churn out as much art as possible when nobody is really even expecting that of me. I’ve always had a tendency to push myself pretty hard.

Essentially what I’m hoping to accomplish here is three things: 

One, to try and prevent burn-out. I’ve been posting extremely consistently on Patreon for nearly five years now, and it takes an enormous amount of creative effort. I can do better at pacing myself. I don’t think anyone but me is expecting such consistent updates. Especially with Covid happening this year, and not being able to go to cons or hang out with friends or do other things like that to take my mind off art and to rejuvenate myself, I’ve been feeling the strain a bit more than in previous years.

Two, I’m hoping to trade quantity for quality. Fewer updates overall in order to make better art in the extra time I have. Especially if I don’t have to interrupt my flow just to crank out a sketch for that day.

And three, to give myself a little breathing room to work on other projects. By posting so regularly, I’ve been expending all my creative energy in just doing daily furry porn. I like furry porn, but I’ve got a ton of other things I’d like to be working on too, but which I just don’t ever get to. Any time I have downtime, I’m just too drained to do other stuff. And when I do, I feel bad for working on it, because I know I won’t have anything to “show” for days, sometimes weeks or months depending on the project.

I hope that all makes sense and you can understand where I’m coming from. If you’ve got any thoughts about what you like or what you think I can do better, let me know in the comments!

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PS—I haven’t made any plans to deal with SISEA yet. For now I have no plans to leave Patreon or to stop doing porn or stop posting here. I have a few ideas in mind of what I can do if it does pass in its current state, but I’m going to wait until an actual bill passes and deal with it then.