Sketch Series / Commission Catalogue: 2020 Updates (pt.1) (Patreon)

As another year kicks into high gear, we've been wanting to share some plans with everyone for the future of the page.  We'll be making some significant updates to the Sketch Series and Commission Catalogue projects moving forward, but there's going to be a lot to go through, far too much, in fact, to take it all in on one single post.  With that in mind, we're gonna parse it out over the course of a couple months, hopefully easing folks into the new processes as they come.

Why are we making any changes at all?   

I'm not gonna sugarcoat any answers here: The sketches and commissions have been around for a long time, but they haven't been as well planned and executed as they could have been.  The biggest issues we face every month are largely due to "project scope".  We went through this problem last year with the comics, and they had to be revamped in order to make more sense of time and personal sanity when it comes to pushing them out.  The sketches and commissions were balanced to the latter half of a given week to make ample room for comics to be finished, and this worked well! Unfortunately, it only solved one part of a two-step problem with time management, and we're hoping to fix the other half this year!
What do you mean by "project scope" and "time management"?

I get it, everyone has different wants and tastes when it comes to their art.  Some people like simpler pieces, while others have a knack for the finest details.  Some love crazy costumes and technical wonders, while others wish for various alts to have multiple versions of the same piece! These extras - while certainly fun - can cause any given project to balloon wildly out of scope and take up far too much time than we have to finish everything in a given month.  At any point in time, I might have 30+ projects to complete.  That's a sketch/commission nearly every day, and we have comic pages to produce every week that can take 2-4 days to complete all by themselves!

Moreover, I don't like that so many people feel forced to confine to the "limitations" of each commission tier.  There are many low-tier patrons who would love to get more content in their pieces, and plenty of high-tier patrons who wouldn't mind reducing the number of characters per piece to ensure that extra level of polish.  I want to be able to accomodate everyone, and I think we're on our way to making sure that happens!

So what are the changes we should expect?

With April now in swing, we're gonna focus on some relatively simpler changes for this coming month.  Expect us to detail some of the larger changes over the next few weeks though, likely enforcing some - if not all - by May:

- Tiers will be renamed and handled in order of highest to lowest

I'm a MOBA gamer, so we're gonna alter the tier names from what their are to precious metal designations (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, etc.)  This will better help us label these tiers for posts and projects in the future, but the more important change -relative to commissions - will be the prioritization of projects per month based on tier level.  In the past, I tackled things in the order received, and what would happen would be this rat-race of folks trying to cram their projects in at the top of the list.
 
The way it will work from now on: If you're in the 100 Tier (Platinum), I'm going to tackle your project before I move onto the 75's (Gold), and so on down the line to the 25's (Bronze).  Outside of those guidelines, I'm gonna tackle the projects based on outliers like stream availability, time left in the day, personal preference, and so on.  We will not be going chronologically anymore, so take your time and get your project sub in when it's convenient for you, just so long as it's before the 15th, I'm still tracking that.

- Sketches are receiving a minor overhaul

In the past, we've tackled sketches like their own individual grade of art, polishing and finalizing with things as minute as "type of PS brush used" to ensure a certain level of "finished-ness" to the sketches.  While neat for the finished result, this created two problems: It forced me to plan a sketch around the knowledge that I'd be drawing a sketch twice, which further limited how much content I could fit into a single piece, and it incentivized folks to just stop at the sketch phase, due to the number of sketches one could get in a year, versus finished commissions.

For this month, we're experimenting with a slightly different sketch technique.  The aim is to maintain clarity of the final product, without allocating time for unnecessary "do-over" steps.  Our initial test results have had very positive reactions, so fingers crossed we can keep the good vibes going!

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That's all on the updates for now, but stay tuned for more information, coming next week! A few of you who hang out in chat during work hours already have a "Sneak-Peek" at some of those changes, as we've been discussing them, but no spoilers for the rest yet! I'm still fleshing out the final details, so we don't want to mislead anyone beforehand ;)  Until next time, stay devious!