Monthly Art Thoughts (Patreon)

Hey guys, hope you all are doing well!

I was thinking about things on the drive home from the office for the evening and some stuff came to mind about the monthly drawings, mostly 'cuz of awareness that the current round of comms is pretty complex and is gonna take some time. So I wanted to throw some feelers out there before I set up the next poll since it's relevant.

One thing I know is with the right amount of loose conditions, I can draw at a pretty fast, sometimes blistering pace, especially after the self-inflicted insanity of doing the Bowser Day stuff in largely under a week. I'd say never again on something that wide-ranged for the sake of my wrists but my brain likes to default to "Challenge Accepted Mode" so *shrug*.  On the flipside, when I plan for full rendering I slow down multiple times over since I'm cautiously plotting stuff out from start to finish so later errors don't turn cataclysmic from too early an oversight.

In either case the one really certain thing is I wanna be able to get more drawings out within reason more regularly.

To that end, a couple ideas and understandings came to light, chiefly that the initial ideas for increasing poll winner options with more Patrons under standard circumstances might be a recipe for bad scope creep. If you haven't heard the term, it basically means that simple ideas on the surface might turn uncontrollably/impractically explosive in size without realizing it due to unforeseen additional aspects, usually setting in in the early stages; it's a significant and regular thing in game dev (i.e. literally PKMN's entire premise, also bankrupts a lot of Indie devs all the time). It works if I don't have to worry hardly about comms, but that all depends on monthly expenses staying quite low and manageable in the future. 

But! A way to still mostly maintain the spirit of the idea would lie in reducing the scope of the drawings themselves in certain ways. So a thought that came to mind was an alternate approach of multiple drawings that are still finished, but not as heavily rendered. That'd also make room for less of a 'winner-disqualification' principle since there'd be more happening. Though at the same time I don't necessarily wanna get rid of the fully rendered art at the same time.

So an idea I wanna get your feedback on is of a few different approaches: Keep current methods the same, go for multiple winners per month with lighter rendering, or alternate the two every month? Of course, comment below too with any other thoughts whether different or adding onto them of your own! I'll leave the poll element open through the weekend.

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Addendum: There's no 'wrong' opinion, some people like things the way they are, some like switching things up, so no judgments being thrown around!