Announcement...

Hey, guys. I posted this on DeviantART earlier, but I'm posting it here as well.

The short version: I'm keeping this Patreon active as an online tip jar, but from now on, virtually everything I draw will be posted publicly, for free, at DeviantART. The only reason to support me here from now on will be purely out of generosity, and maybe some previews and whatnot.

Thank you all so much. Your support over the years has mean a lot to me.

The long version: I've put a lot of thought into this, and as of today I am officially giving up drawing...

...................for money.

I mean, the writing has been on the wall for a while now. Ever since my Gumroad page got un-nuked, I haven't made a single sale.

I'm going to delete that Gumroad at some point.  

My Patreon?  

I'm not going to delete it yet, but from now on please think of it as merely a tip jar.  I just want to post everything I draw publicly, and I feel like it's been a while since I've been able to consistently "upload exclusive content" on a reliable basis. I don't think my patrons have been getting their money's worth, except for those who are just being generous and don't care whether they get secret goodies that no one else does.

( I mean, if I had my way, I'd be giving everything away, but thousands of people would be tipping me one or two dollars a month. )

Maybe that can still happen. But let's face it, AI art has completely flooded the zone.  These old fandom spaces of ours have been completely transformed.  I wish things could have been like they were last decade for a bit longer, before this change was thrust upon us.

Remember the flood of Ghibli Memes from a few weeks back?

Maybe you loved them, maybe you hated them. But you probably saw them because they were nearly unavoidable.  And you saw them all for free. Whatever dopamine hits of pleasure or amusement or disgust you felt, you felt a lot of them.  For free.  It was a vast amount of content for you to like or dislike, think about, and comment upon...

...whether I like it or not, that's the future -- these viral, communal bursts of AI-assisted novelty.  The future is the young people I see at work who are hooked up to their endless torrent of horrid pink slime content that oozes out of Twitch and TikTok.  

The single artist who toils away for hours and hours every day working on a few comic panels -- we can't keep up with it. It's just not possible.  If I was at home all day, maybe I could be that guy sitting at my computer pumping out hundreds of AI images and trying to flood the zone myself -- uploading tons of collections to DeviantART, selling them as adoptables, and casting as wide a net as possible to try to scrape up as many dollars as I can.

 But I'm not that.

I just want to keep doing what I've been doing.  I want to continue drawing my weird little kinky comics, creating pervy new image sets, and polishing up all my old drawings.  

With the changes at my job, I can -- hopefully -- do that.

Back when I started my Patreon in 2017, I was still making $9.50 an hour and so getting the extra money by selling comics and doing commissions was necessary...

...but now, I'm making over $20 an hour for the first time in my life.  And I don't know just yet how the changes at my job will affect my productivity. Hopefully, they won't affect anything.  But I can't be sure of that yet -- I could be in a situation where I can't bring my laptop, but could probably sketch on my iPad?  It all depends.  We're going to be getting new employees, and no one at this time knows for sure what the place is going to be like.  

I know this sounds like the "giving up and selling out because reality has set in" speech that you sometimes see artists give, but it really isn't.  I'm just adapting.  I hope to keep going and doing exactly what I have been doing for these last 17 years.

I do actually love my night job. I love the place, I love the people there. Do you know how lucky I am to say that?

If things work out like I hope they do, you'll probably be seeing MORE drawings from me, not fewer.

All these comics and image sets that I've had hidden behind my little paywall for the last decade?  I'm going to post them all publicly.  Not all at once.  Gradually.  Naturally, I want to take a look at them and spiff them up a bit before posting them. This process is going to take years, as I update and re-polish everything, but they will gradually trickle out. Right now, I'm slowly polishing my old drawings from the years 2011 and 2013, and I'll gradually be moving towards the present.

I hope you don't feel that's dishonest of me, posting something that you might have paid for years ago. It doesn't really matter, because they've all leaked online to pirate sites like Kemono-party-whatever.  Some people signed up for my patreon, downloaded everything, and posted it next to a bunch of sleazy porn ads...

( ...and whoever did that, I just want to say that I lay a curse upon you.  May you be dragged to Hell by a thousand demons, may you burn forever in the lake of fire, may your foul children be born as pinheaded mongoloids with their guts hanging out of their asses, may your entire family line perish from the earth and may your souls burn away to nothingness before you come near heaven! )

....nah, I'm kidding.  You're fine. You just wanted to share.  

But yeah, why keep everything hidden when it's already out there?  I wanted people to see it all anyway.

Commissions?

I might do them here and there, probably just for my longtime followers. The days when I desperately needed to draw random things for $30 or $40, those days are thankfully over.

Everyone is learning to use the AI.

It's not a fad. It's not going away. They're not going to make it illegal.

Ahh.

We are all adapting. We are entering unprecedented times.  Everything that's happening this decade, it has never really happened before.

The world that I thought I was going to be living in when I was 12 years old? The world where I might have been a Disney animator, or a comic book artist for Image comics, or some guy who does artwork for Nintendo Power Magazine?

That world is gone. It's not coming back.

Every once in awhile I'll see job offers online and they're depressing meaningless crap like "3-D UI/Motion Graphics artist short-term basis."

I want no part of any of that. I just want to do what I like to do.

I still look forward to finishing the Droid Ahsoka comic, and a fourth Bubblegum Raven, and Slimer Janine, and everything like that.  And I have so many other ideas after that, and I just want to do them at my own pace, without having to worry about commissions or payments or anything else.  I just want to draw the weird cartoons that we all love.

Everyday I just wake up and see what I can get done by the end of the day.

It is one day at a time these days.  One day at a time. In every aspect of life, I am just steadily grinding forward each day. I'm doing all that I can, but I can only do so much.

Let's do it.

^__^