2024

What did I do this year?

I watched parts of my professional life that were working stop working.

Patreon used to be a pretty good system for me to make comics, but they killed off the funding model I was using. It worked great as an incentive for me to crank out art when I got paid based on how many things I posted per month but when they forced everyone to switch to “your supporters just pay a fixed cost every month regardless of what you do” then my finances got reset to a place where spending the month doing comics is not paying enough for me to make ends meet, period, unless I double the amount of people supporting me. And on top of that the comics project I was working on started developing technical issues, my files have gotten huge and unwieldy and super slow to work with. Which is a recurring issue, this was part of what killed the last project, it has been a decade since I had a book-sized thing and this sucks.

I had a side gig doing paid avatars for Reddit that was real nice for a year and a half but they rapidly expanded the market for it and now it’s not worth anywhere near the time it takes to draw these things.

I keep on thinking I need to stop using Illustrator for a bunch of reasons and I just cannot make myself exert the energy to try and make sense of alternatives. Plus doing commissions with it is what pays my bills now. Spending a while being absolutely shit at art because I’m still figuring out a new tool is the exact opposite of appealing.

Also I got married.

I am out of shape and I can’t seem to get myself to return to being a person who gets up and exercises. I could be in much worse physical shape, keeping my main transportation as bicycling means I’m not slowly turning into a sphere, but I’ve sure been in much better shape.

Maybe making an art retrospective image will make me feel better and show me how much amazing stuff I did this year that I’ve forgotten?

hahaha no, I took an entire year to get about 3/4 of the way through the prologue and first chapter of the new comic, which I am feeling very low ebb about overall. I flailed uselessly at animation tools a couple of times. I spent a couple months on Reddit avatars that sold increasingly poorly – the ones I released in October took a month to make and only made me like $370; I’m not sure I even made minimum wage off of those. I think that’s definitely done. It was a nice paycheck at first, the ones from 2023 covered my rent for most of a year. I should really write something about the whole story of that thing sometime, I did it under another name because they involved NFTs when people still had opinions about those.

There’s far too many unfinished things in my folder for this past year. Way too many half-assed porn doodles that got finished enough to wank to but not finished enough to post. Half-finished portfolios and cover letters I haven’t done anything with. Aborted attempts at getting the hang of new art tools. There’s some obvious ideas for new year’s resolutions here, aren’t there. Maybe I’ll make some.

I wonder how the version of me who moved to Los Angeles back in 2019 instead of New Orleans is doing. Is she happy? Is she getting work? Did she get married to her version of Nick? Have any cats wandered into her life?

Anyway it looks like I am signing up for a tour at the co-working space at the Contemporary Arts Center and seriously considering signing up for at least a month of working there. Also I have decided today is a good day to dye my hair. Right now it’s covered in bleach; it’s been way too long since I had my hair bright red. I just lost the habit after moving.

Oh also if you read this far and have money to burn, my patreon still exists.