Summer Summary (Patreon)

I already forgot when I did that summary post for the last time, I don't really care that it's the middle of September already, I really need to do it. 

This time I want to sum up the results of this summer in general. Well, it wasn't the best summer in my life but yet not the worst at all as well. It was quite saturated with all that exhibition stuff which made me so busy with my first big physical work done in a long time since my first attempts in making relief panels with furry characters. This work was pretty time consuming and forced me to distance from my regular furry life for a while but it broadened my horizons a bit. 

I created my first personal OCs alongside my fursona, I tried new art style for the first time in a while besides my regular pencil graphics I always use and I really enjoyed working with these simple shapes, finally felt myself doing something much closer to original authentic 90s style. 

Also it showed me what I'm capable for and inspired me to do more stuff like this in future. And, even though I didn't use that material in that wall piece, I tried out DIY self-drying clay recipe and it turned out well, this success means that I can finally do something much better than my old reliefs made of such a crude material as papier-mache. Sure, Chip the Wolf panel was surely nice, I tried my best to make it as smooth as possible but it still doesn't look like a 100% perfect work for me compared to what it CAN be. So, I very much hope to impress people with something good in future. 

There was also some general art progress this summer, I keep learning about new cartoon characters, expanding my list of ideas, keep opening myself to some new weird kinks and becoming an even more spoiled degenerate which is not a bad thing haha, keep meeting new people and getting more clients to do commissions for. Now it's not a problem to find a person to draw a comm for, it's more like opposite now, I have so many commission requests I feel thorn between and it's pretty confusing to process them all and deal with that huge line. In past, it was easy to do a lot of comms for some single friend who had big plans on me, now, with me trying to please everyone, everybody have to wait for months to get their chance again. Also, I'm getting pretty much tired of commissions and crave for breaks from them more and more. I hope you don't get it wrong, I love my friends and I love the ideas they give me, the thing is my artistic mind is like a very spoiled little brat who wants to do whatever he wants, and comparing personal art and comms it's like your favorite drink and your favorite food. Imagine if you're super thirsty and want to have your favorite drink but somebody offers you a hamburger. Surely you love hamburgers but right now you would like to drink something, not eat some salty spicy burger. The same here. I never feel my urge to draw personal ideas satisfied enough, my head is bursting with ideas and even though my commissions always have characters and kinks I love it's usually never 100% what I would like to draw at that exact moment. This problem causes a bit of a burn out for me. But obviously comms are necessary, cuz I need to pay my rent and satisfy my needs so it's quite a dilemma. 

Another professional problem I faced recently is becoming too popular and having too much social bonds. 2000 followers on Twitter and 1500 FA watchers is definitely not the highest level an artist can reach, to say the least, but for me it was enough to get myself utterly overwhelmed in socials. I reached the point when Telegram makes me feel myself on the edge of a mental breakdown caused by a social anxiety, I feel rage and want to punch my monitor every time I hear or see a message notification. I realized that working and having telegram opened as a background are two INCOMPATIBLE things. My art productivity decreased greatly during recent months and there can be different reasons for this but I'm sure that socials is one of the worst of them. People say "Don't push so hard on yourself, you should rest too." thinking that me forcing myself to draw is the main problem but holy crap, I spend three times more time on answering countless messages rather than drawing, like talking to people is my main job, what kind of rest it is? Sometimes there were cases when I wasn't able to stop answering people for 6 hours in a row and simply pull my ass off my chair to cook something at least no matter how much hungry I was so I end up cooking my first meal only at late evening. People work 8 hours a day in an office and they don't have time to chat, I want that kind of mental privacy for drawing too. The only problem is my boyfriend, I don't want to miss messages from him, so I usually start my every day without telegram, then I get a message from him around 11am or lunch time, then I just left telegram opened because he can send me something but obviously I get much more messaged by dozen other people who see me online and think it's a good time to message me and when I see a message it's psychologically hard to ignore it. Seeing a message, hearing its notification, it's all very distracting and tempting to react which usually ends with long conversations. With my work I need to have whole days with no chatting which became more and more impossible lately and I don't like it, I feel really broken. I barely play video games, I watch videos only when I'm having my meal, I rarely take a bath and YET I have so little time for drawing because answering everyone became the biggest chore of my life. So, to solve this problem I created a separate telegram account which purpose is to stay in contact with my bf without tempting other people with my online status, to not distract myself with other messages and answer other people only when I feel up to, only when the work is done and I have real free time to answer, not when others want me. Anyway my bf is very busy himself with his own work and he doesn't message me terribly often, also it's never a wall of text so he doesn't really mess up my work schedule, the only problem was that I couldn't close telegram because of him. It's for everyone's good, especially those who wait for more content from me and especially for my commissioners who wait for their art for too long because I constantly get distracted from my work. I want to live a life where my mind is free from the very thought that somebody wants to talk to me when I'm working, to not even tempt myself.

One more problem I had recently is related to my PC. For many years it was very sluggish, annoying me with freezings, lags and countless missing driver errors which didn't allow me to enjoy stuff like many different games or such basic software as OBS Studio for screen recording, SonyVegas, Photoshop, Blender, RPG Maker, latest versions of GIMP instead of one from 2010 I used all these years and so on. In the beginning of this month I had some very scary PC issues and lots of blue death screens which proved me for real that my system is literally crumbling apart and there's no more time to be lazy if I don't want to lose my data. I was postponing it all this time because I never did OS installation myself and I knew it WON'T be easy at all so with my never ending busy art plans it's no wonder this thing was shelved for good but this time I really had to sacrifice my time. As I expected, it was hard, very hard, I spent two days and two nights in sufferings but after all that I finally did it and got myself a fresh new system, installed all the software I need and even played around with RPG Maker a bit already, stretching my game dev bones to finally prepare myself to some more serious step in making my Volk game which I still want to finish. Blender works fine on my PC too but I don't remember anything after 13 years since my first modeling attempts so I have to learn from the scratch again.

So, these were some good news for desert. I'm sorry for this post being too overwhelming, it sums up the whole summer and a bit of September after all, congratulations if you made it to the end and thanks a lot for being with me no matter what and supporting me even at times like this when somebody else could think that my current productivity doesn't cost the pay.