what I'm working on right now, updates & plans!

I've been meaning to make another update like this for a while, so this one's a little lengthy! It's broken up into subjects to make it a little easier to read (hopefully). I find that it's helpful to write these thoughts down and share them with people who are interested in what I'm doing. 💜

● current works in progress

Right now my main focus for the month is completing two works in progress: Professor Novis' Vtuber model and my Fields of Mistria zine page illustration. The zine illustration is at the end of this week and is about 90% done, just needs some touching up and refining. The zine was a big of a personal project, but I think it's important to do things that are a little bit self-indulgent at times. Deadlines are always kinda stressful though, so I'm hoping to finish it up within the next few days!

Novis (formerly Tetsuo) is also very close to being completed, but just needs a lot of fine-tuning and tweaking to make sure the artwork is ready to be rigged. The plan is to have the art all finish and ready to mark as completed by August 31st. I'll be sharing more WIPs soon! (I need to take some more WIPs/screenshots still! It's a little complicated because there's so many layers and things to toggle on and off lmao)

● commissions

Once those to major deadlines are out of the way, I'll be able to shift my focus back to finishing all the remaining commissions in my queue that have yet to be started (thank you to everyone who's been waiting so patiently for me to be ready to invoice & start your commission!), and start taking on new ones! I'm really excited for that, because it feels like I've been in limbo for most of this year and haven't been able to start a lot of new projects.

My focus at first when I open up new comms again will probably be smaller scale projects like sketches and sketch pages. I'm thinking of making some new comm types that I can offer at a lower price that are a bit quicker to complete, and I'll probably be asking patrons to be guinea pigs for them so I can make some example images, so keep an eye out if you're interested in that :3

● new patron benefits / patreon updates

Posts have been slim here lately because of the aforementioned projects, and also a lot mental and physical health issues getting in the way of things. The health issues are ongoing, and I do hope things get better, but I hope to restructure things a little bit to make it easier to have new content to post for you all even when I'm not doing well.

My ideas for that, which I'll be working on in the coming months:

• Posting more WIPs and sketches, like small OC doodles and fanart of things that I'm interested in. I'm hoping that I can start a habit of spending ~30 mins each day on something like this that I can post when I'm ready.

• Drawing my friend's OCs and patron OCs more frequently. The OC polls have been fun so far, and while I might not do them every month, I'd like to incorporate something like that into my regular schedule. It's a little tricky finding a good balance, especially because I need OC commission requests coming in to keep myself afloat financially. I might expand or make a new tier for people who want to get recurring OC art - we'll see!

• On the subject of OCs, I also would like to start making low cost adoptable specifically to offer to patrons so that more people can get one! I'm aiming for something in the $20-50 range per character, probably on a pose template or base body that I'll make for customizing. If this sounds interesting to you, I'd love to hear it! I'd love to start amassing a list of adoptable ideas!
  

● quick note about mental health & personal stuff

Last month, my mental health took a nosedive due to resurfacing trauma and the impact it's been having on my life. The good news is that after it started getting so bad, I doubled down on my search for trauma therapy and now I have some things established. On top of that, I've just been trying really hard to improve myself and take care of myself. It's challenging, but I'm proud of my progress. There have been times in the past where I struggled just as badly but neglected my health and ignored my own needs in order to keep it business as usual, even though I was isolating myself and dissociating from my pain in the process.

I'm a different person now than I was even just a few years ago, and I am no longer stuck in any of those toxic environments from the past. I can prioritize bettering myself and taking care of my own health. That's the biggest comfort I have right now, and it's helping to keep me moving forward.

The situation with increasing internet censorship and payment processors has been a big source of anxiety too, and I wanted to talk about it here briefly. I'm sure most of you are as invested in queer art as I am so you've probably heard a lot about it already.
As someone who draws naked people and queer art of various kinds, I feel this vague sense of unease, like I'll wake up one day and be banned from XYZ service or app. I draw a lot less explicit art these days, but I still don't want to self-censor just to try to avoid some kind of ban wave of 18+ creators. Even if I purged all my explicit art altogether, I think the moving goalposts will continue to close in on anyone creating overtly queer art, if these organizations behind the push for censorship get their way.

So I don't know what's going to happen. But I've been trying to focus on the things that I can control, and surrounding myself with lots of 18+ and queer artists, trying to build more community and solidarity with people in a similar situation as me. I've been very reclusive in the past and just posted my art without really talking about myself or trying to connect with people, and I really hate how that's lead to me feeling pretty isolated. That's something I've been working on. I think that community and solidarity is one of the most important things we have right now, and I know my happiness and peace of mind can improve the more I work on this.
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That's about it for now! It's a long post, so thank you for reading! Please feel free to drop a comment if there's something that you wanted to provide feedback on / ideas for / etc. I'm going to keep working at these things, so I'll have more to post up soon <3