Nuki News #76: Your Character Here!

So, I’ve finished my NovemBEAR YCH, the first one I’d done explicitly for money! Technically there was a small YCH I did exclusively for Patreon during my 1 year anniversary- but this one was quite a bit involved. A full picture with 10 whole characters interacting in it! It’d been a few years(2019) since the last group pic I’d made!

Anyhow, you can find the finished piece over on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/ArtieNuki/status/1465748991543447554

And FurAffinity:

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44849279/

So, how’d it go? Well to keep things manageable for myself, I did a first come first served method of getting a spot, and kept each spot the same price. Considering you’d have to have a bear character(or have your character bear-ified) and the size and posing would be pretty much fixed, I thought it’d be reasonable to have the price for a spot be lower than getting a unique commission at the same level of detail(about a 33% discount). Perhaps I could have charged more, as some friends of mine told me, but I made enough for it to be worth the time it took to complete, as any other commission.

All the spots were filled in an hour, as I held the opening on both Twitter and FA with their own posts. Obviously, this has some drawbacks as it was tricky to communicate in both places which of the 8 spots were taken, and what spots were available to claim. FA is admittedly much easier to track this stuff, since twitter obscures comments and replies and the post itself. There were a handful of folks telling me they had an alarm set to try and grab a spot when it opened, but ended up unable to find the post on twitter at all.  Hard to say what was human error as I did pin the post on my twitter profile. But FA can side step that issue altogether with its set-in-stone comment section with clear timestamps and chronological order so I knew who claimed what first more easily.

When it came to working on it, I’d say it wasn’t necessarily *easier* than doing a commission in a single sense. Some things like the drawing phase I’d an easier time with, but I had to spend quite a bit of time constructing the YCH poses in the first place! I think YCHs only really save you time if you are doing it for multiple batches; so if I did another set of bears with 8 other characters, I’d been getting more of a dividend with the time spent.

So will I offer more Your Character Here style stuff? Yes, I think so! This went well enough so I wanna try it more. The next idea I have will be more in the multi-use single character realm of things. Hint: It will involve LEGS, hahaha. When I finish my December commissions, I’ll be working on practicing something that cropped up a fair bit in my art this year- I need to get better at drawing and posing legs. So this will coincide perfectly, hahaha. Look forward to this in January!