December and year in review

Happy New Year! Patreon Payments wills still be on hiatus until I start making an actual comic or something.

Over the last month:

-finished the last two commissions in the partner pokemon series

-made 2 DnD character pieces as examples to try and branch out into sfw commissions(there have been no takers)

-an ask session

Year in Review:

at the end of last year i laid out these goals:

-I want to work on presentation and making my work more professional.

-I want to make merch

-and of course, more comics :D

essentially i was happy with my output at the end of last year and i wanted to work on monetizing what i make. I'm not much of a business man. what I ended up doing was pushing myself artistically. 

what actually happened

-I started doing Patreon Prompts, something i love dearly and even though i havent done one in a few months i still consider it one of my best and successful projects.

-after finishing FST pilot last december I was really confident in my ability to continue pumping out comic pages. that was misguided. I almost immediately jumped into 3 new comic projects and after FST failed to make the funding I had hoped for I fumbled all of them. 

-Bananas and Coconuts was going to be an 8 page comic based off a short made by Ronnie Pawson. by the time i had 3 pages done i was 2 months behind my schedule and I was completely burned out on making comics. So it was shelfed.

-to make my art look more professional I tried making clean stock art for each of my characters. I got Mr. P, Gautam, and Rasheed done in the end. thats 3/8... again.

-I tried opening a redbubble and using some of my existing art for their presets. I know there are better options for merch but I wanted something easy to dip my toe into. I have made $10.23 since I opened in May and I've honestly been too demoralized to try and make any more merch. I hope the 2 people who bought stickers really enjoy them.

-My birthday was probably my favorite project of the year. I did 6 commissions over a week and a half and almost 30 people participated in the public side of it. It was something i did on a whim. i figured a couple people might help me out, but the support was overwhelming! i felt fulfilled and made the most money in a single month that Ive ever made. There were as many comic pages submitted for that event as I made over the whole year up to that point. I'm in awe of the community around me and it was peak twitter.

-I tried making a tiktok. I made 4 "skits" using Bud, Caleb, and Brute before my irl friends and family found the page and i realized that advertising nsfw-tie-in content on tiktok is a terrible idea. plus tiktok is terrible and ive since left the platform all together.

-I was still pretty productive through the summer, I floundered around trying to figure what my next Big Project™ would be. I made half a dozen new characters for various concepts but having 8 OCs is hard enough to begin with and I still feel like theres stories to tell with them. In the end nothing came of any of that.

-I passed 10k followers on twitter! just in time for the platform to implode and sign up for cohost! its 2018 all over again. I'm a lot less phased by it this time because i know that the people who enjoy my work aren't gone and they'll see me around e621 or FA or reposts of my work. my content doesnt begin and end with the platform its posted to and I'm glad I had the foresight to already be using telegram and cohost as my mains over twitter before the buyout. (ive never liked twitter, i think it brings out the worst in people.)

-I started playing DnD and have been a Dungeon Master for about 6 months now. Its fulfilling creatively and the only reason I mention it here is because something that brings me so much joy and has reconnected me to friends from highschool, college, and my estranged family, is also a big part of the reason why I havent made as much creative, original content over the last few months.

-I graduated from therapy. I kind of miss it because ADHD is still hard but I have all the tools to manage it on my own. I disowned my abusive father and decided to prioritize saving money to visit my mothers half of the family who I didn't get the chance to grow up with. My personal life is more healthy and fulfilling than ever.

-After I got home from visiting family i felt different. the art i make is more of a coping mechanism than i thought it was. im thankful for that but making art inspired by Daddy Issues and trauma is harder when you've confronted that trauma in the real world and while it will never go away I have a very different relationship with my past and the idea of family now. 

-I soft quit twitter and I don't really miss it. before I left I felt the need to throw my two cents into one last piece of discourse and I came out as a little and pro-cub. I'm not entirely comfortable with what followed and I don't know how thats going to affect my art moving forward.

-Instead of branding things under my name and individual comic titles it makes more sense to call everything Dads with Benefits(something i can say uncensored here unlike FST) And I made a comic archive with all of the canon art under the name (basically everything but commissions)

-Last year I was too busy with FST to do pokemon commissions and I'm glad I got to do them this year, its something I always look forward to.

-Ive done 4 ask sessions over the last 3 months. I love doing them. Its how I got into this line of work in the first place, doing them on tumblr. Cohost feels like a home for what I want to make.

-i feel like I've grown a lot over the past year, personally and as an artist. I've tried a lot of new things and I've come out better for it. I dont really know where I am or where I'm going. Patreon is on Hiatus and I'm back to struggling to pay rent with commissions alone. 

the future

I don't like being a social media influencer. I don't want to be a V-tuber or a small business owner. I want to make things I can be proud of and things that affect others in a positive way. 

I like being a horny attention whore. 

I love to tell stories but I think I've learned that pr0n isnt the best medium for that. I feel a lot more fulfilled saying what i want to say to my friends and family through DnD. i dont need to show something to 10k people to be proud of it.

I love my characters, the 8 OCs that I've put so much sweat and tears into. I want people to have a connection to them beyond being eye candy. I also really want them to be eye candy.

I wish I could get a real job as a graphic designer or illustrator. someone to tell me what to do and when to do it. then I can draw my horny OCs on the weekends for fun and just enjoy it and not bet the roof over my head on my ability to finish things I used to just do for fun.

2022 was the year I filled my personal life with love and fulfillment. I don't know what 2023 will bring. It will be the year of me figuring things out.