Small changes and adjustments for future works. (Patreon)

Hey everyone, as most of you that are around for some time know, I like to be transparent on things happening and explain why I change things.

First things first:

From now on, pin-up images with more than one character will use "2 slots" of the month.  

As much as I try to make them as fast as possible, there's a limit on how fast they can be done. I thought "hey, if I make the zelda image with less background and pack the characters in a smaller area, it will be faster".

Well ... it wasn't. It still took a lot more time than a "single character pin-up". For reference, pin-ups usually take 5 days of work. The Zelda image took around 8 days of work. 

Some people might argue it was possible in the past, but the reason why it was "possible", was because I worked overtime to get them done (which means weekends, holidays etc).

While I do have a general idea of how much time an image will take, it's not an accurate thing as "oh, this area will take 15 minutes, this will take 30, etc etc".

Since I like to try out different ideas so there's more variety in the images than simply "random scene of the character standing there", I'm often painting things that I didn't paint before, which is great. The downside is that I can't really have a proper idea of how long it will take to make it.

Burnout, frustration, social media etc.

And this is causing another problem that's leading to frustration on my part. I imagine that nobody likes to see work piling up. I see the end of the month getting near and I start to think "oh shit, I have x days to finish this, what if this takes more time etcetc"

While I'm used to the effects of social media, slowly but surely the effects start to squeeze in through the cracks. As much as we tell ourselves we don't need the "approval" of social media, when I paint the images, of course I want people to like it, I want for it to reach a lot of people on social media etc. I mean, one of my favourite things when I post images is see how people will react to it.

And when images start to pile up and delay one another, I start to lose timing to post them, specific dates etc. Those things have a huge impact on the reach each image has. It really sucks when you spend 20+ hours on an image only for it to have a minor reach on social media because you posted 1-2 days later and lost the "trending" train.

And those things start to live in your head rent free. I start to get demotivated, which starts to affect the pacing of the production, I have days where I simply can't get much done in terms of work because my head "is not in the game", I can't focus properly, which further delays works, and it's a snowball effect.

The reason why I'm posting this, is because I'm not happy with the situation. It's one of those situations that I tried to make images that are more interesting, have more characters etc, but ended up having the opposite effect.

Conclusion / TL:DR

• So moving foward I'll try to keep in check my own mindset of "the image needs MORE!!".
• Images that have more than 1 character will use more slots.
• I'll wrap up the current images of may (Gerudo Springs, Jessie Voyeur, Mermays), and send up those rewards by monday (june 5th)
• Aloy image will be send afterwards by the end of next week.

Anyway, this is a bit of a rant / why things are the way they are. =)