important messages about me and plans (Patreon)

-Translated by Chise, vocal by Zhao-

Hi everyone, it is Zhao here.
It’s been a while for me to speak out to everyone, time flies and a lot of stuff happened, this includes both good and bad things.

As there are a lot of things I would like to talk about, it will be a very long article for you to read. If you wish to have a TLDR version of my words, you can scroll to the bottom of this post.

To begin with, I would like to talk about myself, as I wanted everyone to join me together from my childhood till now.

Ever since primary school I was already interested in drawing, at that time I drew on a piece of paper with a lewd girl and almost got caught by my teacher. However this didn't stop my passion and I kept on going as my hobby.

During high school, my parents finally bought me a computer and placed it at home. I was really excited about it and spent most of my time afterschool on paint just to draw many different things. While other classmates are having their fun with online games, I was addicted to my own world of drawing and never felt bored about it.

After graduating from university, I got my first job from a comic company as an assistant, however being an assistant isn't really able to fulfill my passion and goal so I resigned after a short period. Then I became the papa of a vtuber, I wasn’t able to gain much at that time because I was still a noob to society and was scammed for a lot of commissions payment. However I didn’t really pay much attention to it at the time as I was filled with joy and love in the world of vtubers and drawing. However as the pandemic arrived, with everyone stuck at their home I started to feel annoyed with these jobs.

Funny enough, with me stepping into the world of vtubers, I still managed to find my own interest in it, which is when I started drawing Ayame R18 artwork. It was a fresh and new challenge for me and I gladly accepted it.

Slowly, I decided to start my Fanbox account and let others who are interested in my work and are hardcore enough to subscribe to me for my other works in the future at that time. It might not be a lot as an income, it is still enough for me to sustain my daily life and allows me to focus my time on drawing.

As time goes, the more I draw, the more of you guys have joined me on this journey of drawing Vtubers. I got to know everyone across different places, got to talk with overseas fans with my poor English, sometimes I have to rely on Google translate just to understand what you guys are saying in the Discord. However I don’t find this annoying, instead I feel curious, curious about what everyone thinks, curious about how you guys feel, and curious about myself. Even myself sometimes had no clue what to draw, but it was you guys that shared the Vtuber clips randomly on Discord that inspired me to try out different characters. This includes Blue Archive, or Pokemon just to list 1-2 examples.

During this time, Mero had joined me on this journey and we had started Silver Marten Studio along with other people we met in our lives such as our animator Yuar to try out many different things. As a brand new studio, we struggle to pick up commissions and other requests to begin with, but as more and more customers and businesses get to know about us more through our artwork, they have put their faith in us and started requesting us on different projects.

At first, I felt like life could go on smoothly at this pace as I finally had an “official job” for stable income, while I got to spend my life and time on drawing. However this is when things started to go south for me and others in the Studio…

With the amount of jobs I got while having to squeeze my time on drawing out new artworks for Fanbox, I started to feel pressure with the time available. As there are multiple projects that I would need to handle, squeezing out time for drawing Fanbox artworks becomes a problem to me. I was once considering cutting down the number of art sets per month, but my passion, or some may say stubbornness in my heart, told me I should keep on producing 3 sets per month as a minimum. Other friends in this industry had once called me stupid, but I just laugh it out and feel like achieving what the fans want is fulfilling and fun. Not to mention I treated this as a challenge to myself at that time.

Month by month, my wrist started to feel pain, but I only felt that it was only a temporary thing as I believed if I am able to finish things fast enough, I will be able to get some time to rest and eventually the pain will go away and everything will go back to normal. However, as if fate is laughing at my innocence, this pain is starting to impact my normal life. I once had a car crash while traveling on the road and injured my legs. This was all because of me being unable to hold my motorcycle tightly and properly during my ride. During that time I thought it's just me being careless, but as time went by, my wrist only proved me wrong by giving me more pain.

Fast forward to 2024 now, we had joined 2 different events, one was Blue Archive only, and one was FancyFrontier 42. It was a lot of fun, we got to meet different fans from Taiwan and some even came far from other countries to pay us a visit and chat. The events can be called a success although we might not achieve something big compared to other artists, as our first event we still earned a lot of experience and got the chance to meet our fans in real life!

But ever since February, after attending the events, Mero and I both got sick and infected by Covid and this is when my body started to crumble completely and failed me. My head is burning like hell with the fever, my body is powerless as if an anvil was on my back and my wrist had finally reached its limit by giving me pain whenever I tried to hold something tight. But as everyone feels hyped about Aqua at that time, and the disappointment of the Suisei animation. I pushed myself to finish up the Aqua set. But I failed. I failed completely and I feel lost about not accomplishing the goal I set for myself for the fans' reward. It was always my goal to try to keep 3 sets per month, 2 years passed. I never failed it, but this time, I failed completely. I didn’t notice the changes in my mind and body, until Mero steps up and scolds me hard. At that time I was just a machine holding a pen, nothing in mind, idling in front of my computer for a long period of time. And it was a complete mess.

I feel disappointed, I feel like I can do better to do this on time. But time and body had proven to me this is barely possible as of now. Workload, health, emotions, everything stirred together and I finally lost completely. Even after recovering from Covid, I don’t get that passion I once had for drawing, I feel lost about what to draw, I feel lost about what to do. Sometimes I even feel I am a failure when I can’t come up with something new to draw. I opened up my heart to others that I know in real life, some gave me inspiration to step up again, some told me to stop pushing myself, and some told me I should be honest with myself.

I never wished to share my feelings with my fans, as this negativity isn’t what I wished to share with everyone in the community. Until my moderators and others started to feel worried about me. They helped others in the community express their concerns to me, wishing me to open up more instead of trying to solve everything alone. At first I struggled to do so as I feel this is personal. Until one of our mods told me a real life example of artist S.I.U. This is when I started to understand the word “be honest with myself” and rethink about my future.

It is never my wish to harm my body completely just to keep on drawing, what I wished for is to draw healthily while reaching everyone’s expectation of my quality. However, I also don’t wish to be on hiatus for months just to recover and come back afterward, I want to be consistent and keep on going with my work and interests at the same time.

As a result, after my deep consideration, starting this month I will not be pushing myself to produce 3 art sets per month anymore, this doesn’t mean I will not do 3 sets anymore, but I will only do so if my body and time allows me to. I never will know when or which month is available, it can only be decided by my wrist and body.

Some fans had once suggested that I should separate the layers in more detail for previous artworks. I once promised to try to do so with my best, but as time and skill wise, it becomes difficult for me to do so as I merged these items already when I was drawing the sets. Separating it afterward takes a lot of time to re-draw the related parts and editing, not to mention I always encountered issues such as corrupted layers when I convert the files into other formats such as PSD. It sounds like an excuse, but forgive me for giving up providing PSD files starting this month onward too. This way I can save up more time on my other work such as commissions and project requests from the studio. However I will be giving out CSP files as usual, and to compensate for the loss of PSD. I will start to post montages of me drawing out different art sets. This way for those who would like to learn from me, you may refer to the montage and have a rough concept on how I draw different sets.

Sometimes I would come across some “interesting” websites commenting on me being a selfish man for making the files hard to obtain with password, giving out DMCA like a Disney law team. It was never my intention to make things difficult for every fan in my community, however at the same time I would like to keep things fair for those who paid legitimately for my work. This process also applies to a lot of different artists, and I only tried to follow the same procedures as they do. No matter the forms are physical or digital, it is still an art and therefore I hope everyone can understand why we applied passwords on our files. It can be a struggle to access if you are new to us, but you are always welcome to reach out to our mods in Discord for help.

Other than Fanbox and other platforms, I also upload my previous works on Gumroad for sale.

I always read through all the emails per day sent from Gumroad and tried my best to answer them all with Mero together. One of the frequently asked questions is about why we set a duration for the password email to be sent after purchasing. And the reason being is because Gumroad frequently sends us notification emails from banks about the transaction being a fraud and therefore stopped the purchasing. This doesn’t only affect our fans' experience on purchasing but also affects our gumroad account being marked as suspicious if it happens frequently. At the end of the day the most effective solution that we’ve found is to delay the password email sent to the purchaser email. Somehow after applying this we had never received any fraud notification from Gumroad anymore (till now at least).

I know it is really frustrating for those who purchased from Gumroad and unable to access our work immediately and feel the entire step is stupid and ridiculous, but we don’t want both you and our Gumroad account being marked as fraud randomly while we are only providing our work for your enjoyment and collection. But please understand us about this setup. 🙁

At the end of the day, I hope you all will get to know me more by having me expressing myself and thoughts as my mods and other fans suggested, and hope to express some of your concerns about our actions and procedures on why we do so or not doing so.

If you are still reading until now, I truly thank you for your time and all the support since joining our community. I never can do enough to express my thankfulness to your encouragement and support! <3

To some of you who don't really have the time to read this 5 pages long of Zhao's love confession, don't worry! I will give you a TLDR version about the changes instead!

🔹 Zhao can no longer provide 3 artsets per month consistently, in worse case not even 2 because of his wrist injury and sickness. If the workload of studio and his body is OK, he will still try to bump out 3 sets as usual

🔹 No more PSD files will be available (Dont worry! CSP is still here), for those who are interested to learn from Zhao you will now starting to get drawing montages from Zhao! Which Zhao believes can be useful for those who has the hearts of stepping into the world of drawing

🔹 As some people concerned about why Gumroad password wasn't released immediately after purchases, it is because we got too many fraud warnings from Gumroad. To avoid both you and our acounts being marked as fraud without any reason, sorry for not explaining it out clearly!

🔹 You can refer to the below images for the plan changes, if you have any question, feel free to ask our DC Moderator (Chise)

Hope everyone a healthy body and good weekend! Don't get sick like we do!