An Announcement about the Art Packs (Patreon)

The artwork I do is now not going to be monthly. Instead it will be more sporadic when I post new artwork. Before I explain why I'm doing this, let me explain briefly why I had the monthly artwork in the first place.

Originally, I wanted to be like KokuBoo or Tevit, artists who made most of their Patreon funds making pornographic artwork they distributed every month. I just really liked the idea of people wanting to support you for your sexy art. I was just starting out making By Your Hands and my writing responsibilities were decreased massively at that point, so I decided to do the monthly artwork thing. I also wanted to be able to work on my art skills as theorerically there were going to be months where I wouldn't draw at all, so I needed the practice, not to mention getting to do other art styles.

Originally the polls decided who I was going to draw, and pretty much all of them involved the guy getting fucked. That wasn't really creatively sustainable for me, so I just ended up changing it so it's just whatever I wanted to draw with the poll being less in control.

Recently, however, I've decided that it's not really something I wanted to do every month for a couple of reasons:
It was simply difficult to muster up the motivation and creative energy to finish these illustrations. Often, I just wanted to work on BYH, and I think the illustrations suffered in quality because of that. This also went against one of the reasons why I wanted to do this as I didn't feel like I was improving because of these artwork.
I ended up getting a lot more work than I bargained for starting out. BYH became bigger and bigger with each update and I ended up needing a lot more art assets than I could put out in a month. Not to mention, I want to do other things such as take commissions, work on new projects, and possibly get Barachoda Bloom out of hiatus.
There wasn't much interest in the illustrations. Yes, they would get likes and a couple of nice comments here and there, but the posts about BYH just got a lot more attention. Let's say that my Advanced Tier patrons are the ones most interested in my artwork (Basic Tier don't get access to the illustrations while Blooming Tier has several benefits that have nothing to do with the illustrations). As of this writing, I have 24 Advanced Tier patrons out of 122 paid patrons. That's slightly under 20% of all of my patrons. While that's considerable, it's still a minority of people, and there are also other reasons why they're Advanced Tier such as wanting the WIP art for the game or simply wanting to support me more than the basic tier. It didn't help that artwork of humans got a lot less interest than artwork with furries, which kinda put me in a box if I wanted to satisfy my patrons.
Related to the above, I just didn't want to advertise these illustrations. I'm not big into marketing and so I didn't want to work on getting people to join my Patreon specifically for my artwork beyond the obituary social media posts. It would take me a lot of work to get to the level of KokuKokuBoo while also having to get my art skills on par, while also marketing BYH as well.
In short, I felt like I was putting in more work for less results. That's why I decided to stop making this a monthly thing. I'll still be doing these from time to time, basically when I feel like it. I'll try my best to do an illustration every February (Lunar New Year), June (Pride+Queer Games Bundle), September (Just needed another month to balance the year out) and December (BYH anniversary).

If you want to tell if I'll be making an illustration for the next month, just check if I posted a poll related to the artwork for the first week of the month. If I do, then there will be special artwork for next month, otherwise there won't.

I want to make up for the decrease in patron benefits by adding a new benefit for Advanced and Blooming patrons: prioritization for taking comms. I will be opening up comms and slots will be available to both of those tiers earlier. I won't be opening commissions until March, but just wanted to let you guys know sooner rather than later.

So sorry for all those who became patrons specifically for the artwork. I hope you guys understand.