Lifetime Rewards Expanded + How I've Been Doing (Patreon)

Hi everyone!  I hope you all have been doing well, especially with uh... how things are right now.  (cough)

How I've Been Doing

I have been doing okay!  I haven't been able to keep up with jogging every morning, but I try to do it as often as I can, especially since all I do for most of the day is sit and work.  I've definitely been drawing a lot more (cough SFW stuff, not as much NSFW as much as I would like) and I've been trying to experiment with a lot more subjects that I'm not very good at!

Also, I was super busy with a big commission project this month, so I've been a little late with most stuff.  I'll be working on getting the NSFW monthly illustration and sketches for this month out to you all tomorrow!  Along with the polls, remember to vote on them!

Edit - I'm buying myself some brand now RAM.  I am finally upgrading from 8 gigs of RAM to 16 gigz of RAM.  I'm very excited.  Now I can work on even BIGGER canvases!

Drawing and Art Study Sessions

As a side note, I started hosting group art + art study streams in my Discord server.  There's no hard schedule, what I've been doing and want to continue doing is picking a day (Saturday/Sunday) and a list of times, putting up a poll, and choosing a time based off of that.  It's been a really nice way so far to (1) push me to do art studies, (2) get to watch other people draw, and (3) encourage others to draw and do studies with me!  I try to make it as relaxed as possible, since (for me) it's hard enough as it is to even try to put time away to study.

Lifetime Rewards

Lifetime rewards!  That thing I talked about before!  I've been thinking reeeally hard about it, and talked a bit about it with others to try to get their thoughts on it.  For the system, what I've been thinking about is:

• patrons accumulate points based off of their lifetime pledge
• patrons can purchase rewards using these points
• cycle of redemption periods - For example, Patrons can redeem a specific reward once per 3 months.
• a changing list of rewards per cycle - Originally, I wanted to have a set list and slowly add and remove things from it.  One thing my boyfriend brought up was, "What will you do IF your Patreon grows to the point where you physically cannot fulfill certain rewards?"  I don't want to make it seem like I DEFINITELY believe that I'll grow my Patreon to the point of having 1k+ patrons, but this is a really important thing to think about now while I still have the chance.  If I were to keep it to a set list of rewards, it would be unfair and definitely would suck to get rid of a specific reward that someone has possibly been saving up for.  So having a changing list will allow me to give something nice and personal to people now, but still have the flexibility to remove or change things if I can no longer do it.

That's the basics of the whole system, and I'm gonna be working on programming it for the next few months.  It'll be fairly simple, but I'll have to tweak it and make it look nice for both the Patron and the Creator (me!) side of things.  Also, I get to put my CS degree to use, so... yay!

Art Youtube Channel

Uh... yeah, so it's very hard for me to find time to record the audio for these videos.  I have a lot of ideas for what I want to make (mostly HOW TO DRAW X and a lot of rambling videos on my thoughts about X), the problem is that I don't want to record audio in the same room as my bird, who screeches a lot.  I can't move her right now because of quarantine, which means my boyfriend is outside (which is where I would move her normally).  And then it's hard to find time/periods of silence to record outside of work hours or on the weekend, so... it's just hard in general!  Not only that, but I'm also encountering issues with recording video when I stream, so anything I draw during streams will get strapped video-wise because I can't record the whole process.

I'm trying, but in the meantime, videos will be super slow to come out.  Sorry guys.  :(

That Comic Thing I Talk About Sometimes

Oh!  And one last thing, I've been... trying... to get a Webtoons comic done for the contest that's going on for May/June.  Uh... haha... I've been super busy with commissions/personal art for a while, so I didn't get much of a chance to work on it this month.  But!  I have a SCHEDULE!  Which means I'll definitely finish it on time.  Anyway, I'll post up the chapters (4 planned in total) once I finish them, but keep in mind that I may or may not update the posts to do some minor adjustments before I publicly post them on Webtoons.

Outro

Anyway, that's it!  I originally wrote "wow it's not a long journal like normal" but then I started adding more stuff.. and... now it's really long!  Hopefully it was fun to read.

Lemme know if you guys have any questions/comments/concerns about anything I wrote here, I'd really appreciate any feedback.  Other than that, I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week!