8 YEARS (Patreon)

Last June I just celebrated 8 years since I started my Patreon and started living doing what I love. When they say time flies I think they mean things like this.

Previously working as a systems engineer, my longest tenure in a job was 5 years. When I decided to take a chance on Patreon it was at a time when I was really completely unmotivated with my career and it was also a time when my profession was in an occupational crisis. When I started my patreon I thought that hopefully it could help me financially while I worked on something else. Fortunately, today it's my main source of income (which doesn't mean I still have to work two more part-time jobs to make ends meet).

And from the beginning, despite being excited about this, I also worked with fear. I thought: "How long will this last?", "If I abandon my career to focus on illustration and after a couple of years this idea fails, will I be able to become a computer scientist again? Or will I already be completely outdated?" ", "How long will I be able to continue drawing until I run out of ideas?" All of these fears still persist, although to a lesser extent.

I've been on Patreon for 8 years, and a few years less on Suscribestar and Fanbox. The first years were the most incredible in the sense of my optimistic perception of the work situation of artists and the new opportunities that crowdfunding platforms offered us. Then came the massive leaks of content from sites created specifically by people who hate artists. When that died down, came the censorship of payment methods, then the NFT scam and today the threat of AI - Generatives. A lot of stress that has only been possible to remedy by focusing on the work I love, my great team of talented collaborators and with the support of true fans, for whom I am deeply grateful.

I would like to say that for any artist crowdfunding pages are the solution, but that would be false. At the time of opening my patreon I was already moderately known as a NSFW artist with very specific niches and I had been in the medium for more than 10 years, so it was not a “starting from 0”. Most artists have to fight hard to achieve some notoriety and today, with the manipulation of algorithms and all the garbage generated by AI that saturates the networks, it is a very difficult task. But still, try to stay true to your art, to what you can do, achieve and learn. No ARTIST (the real ones) enters art thinking about becoming millionaires. The only thing we aspire to is to be able to earn a living with our art so we can dedicate all our time to it.

Although I will be an artist all my life, because I love art, I really hope to continue dedicating most of my time to what I love.