Where have I been?

Hey everyone. 

Giving a sorta lengthy status update here.

I've been doing a lot of reflecting as to how I'll be handling this account going forward. I've been a bit uncomfortable with how people see my work, as if they gain ownership of it simply because they're paying for it, when my Patreon's focus should be more about the support and not some weird "supply and demand" thing. 

I touched on this a bit with my last post, but frankly, in short: I became tired of seeing art that I intentionally made for patrons only to be put up the next day on some image sharing site. As if being a paying patron allows one to own the work and repost it all for everyone else to reap. This was a bit discouraging which started in another lapse of activity here. So I had to take a step back, and rethink how I'm doing this.

As I don't necessarily enjoy the process as much as I used to when I was hungrier, I still do love making art for the only reason that I can make someone happy with it. And I want to get back to that core principle of why I do it.

On my regular account(s), I never paywalled any of my content there. Every illustration I drew for fun or even work gets posted for free. I don't ask for handouts, and whenever the few times I do open commissions, it's not from a point of neediness, but more to give someone a chance at getting art from me. What I'm getting at is that creating content to be massively consumed and sold is extremely stress-inducing and soul-sapping of creativity. I already do enough of this daily working on a soon-to-be-finished commercial game. Having this stress permeate everything else I do only makes me hate being at my desk even more.

So, because of this, I started posting all the NSFW work I do publicly. It's not that I don't think patrons should get special benefits, I do, especially for those who long support me and my work. This mostly comes from the reasoning that I personally feel I make the best content when I'm mentally free. And if I'm making the best content, then people will want to support anyway, and those supporters will get the best work from me. It should be a cycle, not a one-way street. At least that's how I see it.

So I'm not paywalling any NSFW art here anymore. 

I will still do special time-locked art every now and again, but for the most part, it will all be visible. I will still have rewards for images (such as high-resolution versions, PSDs, etc.), but those will be not be released in packages anymore, just picked up on appropriate posts here. Not sure if I'm going to still package things up on Gumroad for people who don't use Patreon or not, but I likely will; we'll see on that.

With all this said: there will be a few changes to some of the pledges. It will primarily consist of the base "tip" pledge, then the appropriate tiers following, and everyone is free to jump around pledges whenever they like if they feel they're not getting enough in that category. My Patreon will also get heavy on character requests, so there will be a smaller, new tier for a group of patrons who like to request any existing character they want to see from me drawn how I would do so. For the rest, there will continue to be polls from time to time that will determine a theme if I'm fresh out of ideas for any given time period.

Doesn't need to be said, but I have a lot of catching up to do here, but I feel that now, I'm in a much better mental state of doing that going forward. I got a bunch of ideas for book and doujin projects with Phoebe and Jelle and other stuff that comes out of here now. And detaching the price from building that stuff gets me more motivated to make it. All I ask is that if you continue to like what you see of any of it, just consider to support, because art does take time to make, and good art even more.

Robo out.