What's been going on

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, life's been getting a little more complicated than I anticipated. I've been dealing with a lot of stuff recently both mentally and physically and now it's started effecting my ability to illustrate properly at the rate I need to to keep up with things.

this next part may be a bit tmi, so feel free to skip it if you'd rather not read the details.

medical tmi starts here

I've been having troubles with my eyes since April of this year. First it started as some swelling, then a few lumps. I saw a doctor about it at the beginning of May and they recommended warm compresses, which I had done for a while. They said it should go away eventually and wouldn't need to do much unless my vision started changing... eventually, it did.

I went to follow up with them at the end of last month and they recommended I follow up with an optometrist., and now I've been in and out of that office three times and my vision still hasn't improved. The overall health of my eyeball itself is healthy, but this eyelid issue just keeps persisting. There's times that it gets better, gets worse, but it's just annoying, irritating, in the way and generally unappealing.

I don't mind the cosmetics of it because I never considered myself an attractive person, but this issue with my vision has made drawing more of a challenge than it has in the past, and it's also affecting my mood and triggering my depression. I have made an appointment with an ophthalmologist, but the earliest they could get me in is October, which just feels forever away..

medical tmi ends here

aside from the doctor's appointments, I've just been busy finding stuff to sell on ebay and tcgplayer to get by since I can no longer count on myself to take any more commissions than I already have. It's been a nice feeling being able to downsize, but at the same time it's been a lot more time consuming work than I had thought.

Mostly I'm just glad I was able to get the Patreon pictures of those in the appropriate tiers done early this month so I could focus on my health stuff towards the end..

Enough excuses, let's talk about the future of this Patreon

So I'm sure a lot of you figured this was going to be a topic to come up eventually if we didn't get more subscribers soon.. basically I don't think I can keep up with the Patreon anymore with the amount of people we have subbed to it..

between the commission tiers, monthly art and monthly streams, it's been hard finding the time to keep up with it all, and while the guaranteed money is nice, it's also cutting into me more than I thought it would; what I'm getting is less than what I'm putting in, and it's... tough.

This month I'm going to be putting the Patreon on pause again, more than likely going to finish up the monthly image sometime next month if my eye health starts improving and at the end of next month, that may be it.

I appreciate everything you've all given me for almost a whole year now, and I'm sure we'll cross paths again eventually, but I can't really do this anymore, at least not in my current condition. The Patreon may come back at a later time with different ideas in place, but it's just not feasible at the moment.

If you'd like to donate still, I do have a ko-fi available: ko-fi.com/shinywark
If you'd like to see what I have for sale on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/usr/shinywark

Thanks again for everything, and hopefully we'll talk again soon.