New Year's Shuffle (long post) (Patreon)

I said I'd come back next week when I had less Covid in my system, and here I am this week with less Covid in my system!

I'm gonna continue with my plan to mark up the request tier to $15 still, and to do that I'm gonna have to wipe the tier so nobody's in it lol. It'll kick everyone in there out, so I'm doing that next week so y'all have a chance to grab files from previous months you might not have grabbed by now. I'll be holding the spots for people previously in the tier for a month if you don't immediately rejoin, but if there are somehow still spots left open come March it's open game.

NOW

THAT BEING SAID

I've had time to think about this. Had a bit of time to think about my art production rate in the last year, and the profit that reaps. There's a few problems with my current model of income. 

This is all about to be a very long ramble (sorry i do that so often in these kind of posts lol) that mostly concerns the request tier, so the tl;dr is that I'm cutting down slots from the request tier. Feel free to read all of this or just skip to the end lmao.

One major problem is that the majority of it comes from the request tier. I'm happy I can provide a regular service that regularly pays itself back with minimal pressure from my audience, but this is not where I primarily want my profit to draw from. What I've been doing for the last several months when I'm not trying to draw other things is catering almost exclusively to my request tier.

I have to do a priority shuffle all the time, and things fall off to the side because come halfway through the month, I start prioritizing the 12 people I owe something for by the end of it.  And I know it doesn't say anywhere I owe anyone anything explicitly by the end of the month, but I know we'd all prefer it if art for that month comes in on the same month lol.

But I still have other things I wanna draw. I have other projects I'd like to juggle. The work I do on CenUni is a full scale comic project, and something I wanna do for Crash Buster someday. I won't have a deadline with Crash Buster, but juggling request art with comic work will probably make it a really slow grind when I finally get to it.

Putting aside the OCT comic, I would like to go back to getting the rest of my Patreon in on my work too. I want to feel like my art is affecting more than just one person at a time. I wanted to do those character suggestion arts and go back to poll art so that I can do more for more people. I want my Patreon to grow because people genuinely want to support my art, not just because they get art back out of it. And it's hard to make content people will want to support a Patreon over if I'm only working for 12 people in it.

And so major problem 2 with my income model: I'm simply just not drawing fast enough to get to all the things I want to. The reason I'm not drawing fast enough is because I'm drawing too well for people making up a very significant portion of my income.

And the most obvious solution here is that I just need to draw shittier on the requests. Let myself actually just draw something REALLY messy and then just kind of clean it up, because that's as far as $10 ($15 now lol) should be affording you guys.

But I really can't do that for some reason. When money's a factor I stop drawing like this-

Which takes me like 5-20 minutes, the amount of time I should be spending on requests this cheap. And instead draw like this-

Which can take me anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days depending on how much grief the pose gives me. I'm not drawing at the level of a $10 ($15) sketch request, I'm drawing at the level of a grayscale commission. And even if I bump that amount up to half of my normal commission price (which is going up whenever I can finally open again sorry), it still wouldn't justify the amount of effort I keep exerting on these requests.

And I know you guys aren't telling me to keep drawing like this. I know I don't have to be drawing this cleanly and going through so many steps. I keep hunting for a sketchier and looser style to draw in so I can have more time in the month for myself and other endeavors, but it just does not happen lmfao. I keep drawing like I usually do at a very clean level no matter what I try. It doesn't take longer because I do shading and grayscale by the way, it takes so long because the act of drawing everything else takes forever. And it takes forever because I don't wanna disappoint people.

And you can try to tell me you're not gonna be disappointed if I start delivering messier art in the future. Some of you have. But if I commit to downgrading my art, I know people will- on some level- be disappointed. And I can't really handle that lol. 

You guys in the request tier make up the majority of my income, how can I handle that?

So major problem 3 with my income model: it's not sustainable.

I can't keep this up. Even if I somehow succeed at dumbing my artstyle down, I can't keep supporting these numbers. I can maybe do this for another year, but the fact of the matter is that I need to make bigger money moves at some point. I need to open commissions. I need a more profitable business relationship. I need to pull people in. I haven't had a new Patron outside of my personal circle in forever, never mind how the other site performs.

I need to grow and get a move on with my life, and I can't do that if I let myself stay attached at the hip to mini commissions.

So yeah, long and skinny of it is that starting next month the request tier is gonna downscale. 

My profit from the request tier is... actually not really gonna change that much because of how much I need to shear, but ideally it helps free up some time. Which was the ultimate goal of my Patreon to begin with. That is, affording me the time to work on other things while being able to provide a basic service for all the people supporting it.

The request tier is probably gonna go back to 8 people at most, maybe 9. Ideally 9, but I'll kick it back some more. I don't like having to do this honestly, especially because the request tier saw some people shuffle in and out towards the end of the year. I'd hate to make people feel like they got cheated out of being able to make the most of it if they don't get back in.

I'm willing to hear out any particular ideas anyone else has regarding how I handle affairs from here. Whether it be what I do about tiers, or what I should do in regards to drawing. And also what to do about the leftover request tier patrons that are inevitably gonna get pushed out with the downsize. Ideally in the comments lol, but feel free to take it back on Discord too I suppose.

I say this at the end of posts a lot too, but I really am genuinely thankful towards everyone who has supported the Patreon. It means a lot. I don't really go through all this grief because I'm not thankful, it's because I'm afraid of letting y'all down lol. I know in the grand scheme of things nobody will be devastated if they don't get one piece of art, but people who chip even a little out for me mean a lot. It's a genuinely big gesture for people to do for me, especially on the regular, and I want there to be fair recompense if it happens.

Thanks again for the support y'all.