Some changes and plans for the future

Hey everyone! This is a bit of a news post to summarize some things I would like to change about how the patreon is run. Sorry if this is a bit of a long read. I'll try to keep it as short as possible.

What's been going on? Basically life for me has been pretty much the same for the whole year so far. Not much going outside, due to a long lockdown in Austria, lots of work on art, etc. Basically the same as usual, except that there have been some projects here and there that took time away from the art I usually do for Patreon. Some of these projects have kept me busy to the point where I had to delay cameos again and again. Thankfully these projects are finally clearing up and I have more time to put into Patreon now. I want to use that time to make some changes that should benefit all of us.

Cameos and Delays: First of all I want to change how I go about doing cameos. Up until now I never really planned very far ahead. What I would do was that I would plan a cameo piece for the same month, contacted everyone who would get a slot for that cameo and worked things out with them. Very often it would take a while to hear back from the person, which caused delays. Then sometimes people were not happy with the idea I had, which caused more delays, because I had to think of another piece to fit them in, or find somebody else to fill their place. Stuff like that often led me to run out of time for the particular month, which in turn led me to draw up non-cameo pin-ups to fill whatever gaps I had left to fill for each month. I aim to finish 3 illustrations every month to keep a basic, stable level of income, so if a cameo piece has to get delayed for whatever reason, I needed to draw something that I could conceivably finish by the end of that month. So you can see where this is going. This way of doing things led to cameos being delayed again and again. Extra non-patreon projects that I had to push into my schedule made that problem worse. However, nobody but me is to blame for this. I had this system in place since I started doing cameos and it simply doesn't work all that well, so it's time to change it.

Proper Planning: I thought about all this and came up with a plan: I will schedule what cameo slots to work on for the whole year and contact those who get slots months in advance to plan out exactly what they'll get. This should provide me with a backlog of stuff to work on. For example, if I notice that I can't finish a bigger piece on time, I can have a look at my backlog to see if there's a simpler cameo piece waiting to be drawn. Then I can take that simpler piece (like a Pinup of one patron's character) and fit that into my schedule. I think this should make it much easier for me to actually fit all the things I have planned into each month. I made a Trello board to keep track of all the slots.

https://trello.com/b/KVmObREn/2021

The added benefit of this is that you all can also check out what's planned for each month, whether or not the next piece will be a cameo piece, who holds each slot, etc. I will try to keep this as up to date as possible and also throw previews in there. Right now the plan I have for this should get us all caught up on cameo slots that I still owe, as well as slots for the entire rest of the year.

I will soon write all those of you who are up for a cameo slot and will talk out details on what pieces I can put your characters in, your preferences, etc.

What about that comic? I did actually put some work into a comic already and would still like to take that somewhere in the near future. I'm not entirely sure how to fit it into the new schedule yet, since I would like to focus mostly on catching up on fulfilling cameo slots I still owe, but I'll think of something. If you have any ideas on how I could go about doing this without delaying cameos again, please feel free to comment about it.

Small changes to the Patreon page: I plan on typing out an FAQ that explains how things work to newcomers and existing patrons alike. This will be a pinned post on my front page, which will also include the link to the trello board, so you can easily check the status of what I'm working on at any given time. Depending on how much time there is, I would also like to touch up the look and feel of my patreon a little bit, but that's rather minor stuff.

But yeah, that mostly covers the important stuff for now. I'm sorry for the wall of text, but I gotta let you all know what I have planned. Gotta improve things somehow and make it all a bit more transparent to you all. Please let me know your thoughts. If you have any input that could be helpful in improving the patreon and how it works, I would appreciate that a lot.

Thank you all for bearing with me and my sometimes chaotic ways. I hope you all are well and thank you so much for the support. <3