After two years without pause I have to cancel this month's fanart and sequence poll (Patreon)
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...and it was a tough decision to make. Especially when there are a lot of people who support me to participate and vote on those polls.
Why am I canceling them this month?
As you may have noticed, I am still working on the backlog of April and am far from done. Since February it slowly got worse and worse. Instead of working on my projects and actually providing new content as soon as we hit the first of a month I had to work on stuff that should've been done a month prior, sometimes almost till half of the month is over..
I can't continue like this without feeling bad about you not getting the content you actually support me for or the fanart and sequence content in time. This affected my mental health and heavily affected my productivity.
I want to go back to create new and awesome stuff, instead I am just working on a backlog and once that's done I have to work on the next fanart and sequence after that just to avoid having another huge backlog on my hands again. It's just not fun anymore.
But this isn't the only reason. You may know that I am in an orchestra. We got one big event each year at the end of May which takes a lot of hard work to pull off. Over the course of the last two weeks of May I have to help out here and there at varying times of the day. Other musicians and me build up stuff, help decorating and do all sorts of things prior to that. At the event itself I am busy throughout Thursday May 26th, celebrating my mother's birthday at May 27th and working on an event at May 28th afterwards. There is also a 800 year celebration of our village happening in June but that requires us only to play there, no physical work involved. All in all, it will be hard to focus on conceptualizing a fanart or sequence in correspondance with the winners in a time where my mind may be focused on something else. It's also taking away a lot of time I usually would have for drawing/streaming. In times like these where I don't know when I am on or off, projects like TACS 2 or something else are way easier to work on because the sketches are already done and I just have to sit down and continue where I left off.
Tldr: All in all due to my huge backlog, growing frustration and being busy half of the month caused me to cancel this month's fanart and sequence poll.
What is the next cause of action?
There will be two ways I offer to compensate you. I mean you're giving me your money, it's the least I can do. All of them require you to message me so I can take the appropriate action. If you have nothing against me pausing those projects for a month and are still happy to support me with the money you pledge, you don't have to do anything. I am grateful to all of you no matter what you choose because you all made my dream of creating art fulltime a reality.
1) Plain and simple: A refund. Just message me if you want to get refunded and I will issue them as quickly as possible. You loose your access to my content as soon as the refund went through, just in case you didn't know ^^
2) I will save all the suggestions you've made this month and apply them to the ones that will get posted in June. In short: Two suggestions of yours in total for June's fanart poll.
This is the first time ever that I feel forced to do this and I am sorry that I wasn't able to tackle it any other way. The Patreon Sketchdump and Colored Sketches will still happen because they are way less work. Just in case you were wondering.
Thank you so much for your understanding and your continuous patience since February.
Have a nice day everyone and stay safe,
Aron