Yearly Review - 2022

What a year, huh? We got so much stuff going on everywhere, although Twitter's adventures being owned by Elongated Muskrat have been the forefront for me, personally. I started posting on FurAffinity again (and -what a backlog- I have, jeez this is going to take a while to update completely), my separation between accounts haven't really been super positive in my books (although I still like the Glowfux name, it was kinda pointless) but now, well, y'all gonna get some of my detailed thoughts about everything.

First, let's start off with my art: Counting with all the alts, I've got a total of 261 artwork files done this year, which absolutely impresses me because I was pretty sure I didn't work as much this year as I did the last few years! 

On 2021, that total was 264 plus 21 sketch stickers, which makes it a pretty similar year in productivity! A little bit less than 1.3 days between each drawing is, put in perspective, pretty impressive :P

I experimented little with it this year, mainly focused on trying to refine my shading methods, plus some new ways to add colored lineart and to make the artwork a bit more detailed. By the end of the year there, I had to move from Clip Studio Paint to Paint Tool SAI 2, so I had to rework most of my method, but a good portion of it persisted, which is good!

Now, for the glowy elephant in the room: I really didn't work on Patreon as much as I wanted. I remade this to be able to explore more on my own content, but I wasn't really able to do it considering that almost the entirety of those pieces I did were commissions, but I can't cut back on commissions else I'll just plain up starve.

So I'm coming up with a compromise of sorts, let's see who agrees with it.

I raised my commission prices earlier this year to see if I could add Patreon as a way to lower the dependancy on commissions, splitting the revenue between them, and over the months my income dropped vertiginously, to the point where I scaled back on all prices back to what I was offering in 2020 just for a chance to compensate the drop in income with quantity. It didn't work.

I know well how bad talking about money and stuff like that is seen in the community, but I really need to make this work, as art is my only income and I'm working full-time in it for the best part of the last four years, so if compromising didn't work, I have to go all-in.

>> Starting January 1st, I'm going to update my commission prices based on my local inflation and the additional time spent on each piece. I won't charge per character anymore, instead adding up a percentage per extra, making it so more complex pieces are cheaper, but the base price is higher.

> Royal Gryphon members now will not only get you the 15% discount on comms, but also will get you a quick experimental sketch per month, up to a limit of slots I'm still figuring out.

> All personal artwork will have a three-week early post for all patrons, and only after that time they'll be posted on other platforms.

> Any complex project will be exclusive to Patreon, such as extra alts for such personal arts and all other experimental stuff I'm used to play with, for anyone that might be interested, as I'm looking up on maybe starting a small-ish visual novel project to see where it goes.

With that, I intend on accomplishing two objectives:

1. Reduce my monthly need to grind commissions

2. Be able to finally go back to what made me grow in the first place: Fun personal projects and fanart of what inspire me

I really hope y'all are with me on this journey, and thank you so much for all the support, I quite literally couldn't do this without you 💛💛