Spring '24 Update (Patreon)

Hey everyone, I hope you're all doing well.

It's been a minute and a lot has happened in the time between so I wanted to give you guys an update on my status and what's been going on.

I struggled with deciding how much to reveal because I personally view any disclosure of that kind of thing to be too personal and unprofessional but I already let the genie out of the bottle slightly in my last update and there's been total silence on my end; an explanation is owed.
I'm dealing with an undiagnosed nerve compression somewhere in my brachial chain (pit of the neck under the collar bone) that's causing severe neuropathy and pain along the ulnar path (inner arm between bicep and triceps from pit to elbow, and from the elbow to the pinky and ring fingers) of my right arm as well as chronic tension pains in my levator, scalene (neck) and trapezius muscles. The symptoms have been there for years but were only ever extremely innocuous and rare. It suddenly started to get worse about two years ago and spiked in severity abruptly back in December. Its continued to worsen since then and has totally crippled my ability to draw for extended periods of time and to weightlift, the two things in life that give me drive and purpose.
Subsequently I've fallen into one of the most severe depressive states I've ever experienced. I have a lot of grounding and personal tools that I've honed over the years to deal with this but the physical disability is limiting me in ways that I can't seem to work around.

There is no treatment going on at the moment. I'm working with a free clinic to try and get a diagnosis and am taking meds that help with the neuropathy but its a very slow process working with them and there's been a lot of reluctance from medical resources here in town. Ironically the thing that's helped the most was getting a standing desk and using that to keep my elbow and shoulder in a neutral state while working.

I've been able to make a fair bit of progress on the backlog however I'm still only about halfway finished.
Because its going to be infeasible to work on larger scale paintings for the time being I'm going to only offer sketches and cell shaded pieces. I will need to get a backlog queue started for the opening I had in December as well as the last two months. I'll make a post about what my plan is there but it'll basically entail doing a few weekly warm-up style sketch openings and see how that works out. Those kinds of small doodles don't take terribly long and put only a small amount of strain on my arm.
You can see some examples of what that might look like in the attached images.
I'd like to stream regularly again but I still need to test the waters with working for an extended period. Initially its really hard to tell what is going to make my nerve compression go psycho. Some activities, I can feel it immediately. Others, I seem totally fine then I'll get a flare up the following day that can last for up to three or four days. So for April I'm going to be playing it by ear and chipping away as best I can. Streaming seems to really help motivate me to just hunker down and work so I need to lean on that tool as much as possible.

That's the basic rub of what's been going on. I'm gonna do my best to get these pieces finished for everyone and push back against this crazy bout of depression within the limitations that my neuropathy will permit. Thank you so much for your support. So many kind words and messages and encouragement. It has not fallen on deaf ears and it's really humbling. I owe you all so much.

The recent spiel with Patreon definitely has me concerned as the bulk of my work comes from people interested in nsfw pieces but its a can of worms that I just don't have the resources or faculties to tackle at the moment. I will likely end up following the crowd and setting up a SubscribeStar as a fallback plan but for the time being I will continue steady on. My eventual goal was always to be more 'art-focused' with nsfw commissions being more of a 'for-fun' luxury and that won't change regardless of how the platforms' financial backers want them to be managed.

Thats it for now. Hang tight for a streaming announcement and my gameplan for commissions going forward. Also please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, requests or update inquiries. Thank you again and godspeed.

Discord - grimfaustbt
Telegram - @Grimfaust
Email - Link