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Upd8
4 years ago
If you don't wanna read my personal rant and just want an actual update on how things are goin': I'm gonna be postin' a transformation commission later today & I'm workin' on a set of 3 adoptable humanoid dragons.
Now, onto the personal stuff:
I'm admittedly a bit unsure of what direction I want to move in going forward. I've considered setting up a Patreon as commissions are pretty sporadic for me and a more reliable source of income would give me some set goals to achieve outside of commissions. I'm not sure if the sparse commissions are down to my methodology, though. Maybe I should be making a journal with commission slots to make things more clear? Maybe I'm not promoting my ability to do commissions enough? Maybe my prices are too low or too high? Maybe I don't have enough pricing options for commissions? A lot of possibilities.
Another problem is I post exclusively on FA atm. Every person I've interacted with here has been fantastic but looking at statistics for my own works it seems like discoverability is really difficult to attain on this site. Admittedly I don't have enough experience with other sites to say that this is an FA-specific problem, but it seems as though the only way to get anyone to look at your art is to drive yourself into a specific niche. My transformation pieces do significantly better than any of my pin-up pieces, as an example. I greatly enjoy doing transformation pieces (don't get me wrong) but it's a bit disheartening that my more compositionally artistic pin-ups fall a bit flat. I greatly appreciate those that do look at 'em and leave nice comments, but I feel like I'm monetarily incentivized not to bother. Maybe my problem here just comes down to the classic capitalism vs artistic expression problem, tbh.
Another thing I greatly enjoy doing is adoptables, and I know there's a dedicated market for it... but my last adoptable got very little attention. This could very easily be that my adoptable just wasn't that interesting, but I also feel like I didn't give it the best chance. I've noticed people posting reminders for adoptables which is probably something I'll incorporate into the next batch I make. Another thing I'm not sure about is pricing. A full reference sheet for 100$ is really selling myself short and I'd prefer not to go down that route again. This time I think I'm just doing a single full illustration with a bonus simplified sheet that just explains any important information that isn't available in that illustration. That way even if I end up selling at the base price I'll feel a bit more justified.
Unrelated to anything up there, but man - the Candyman sequel was so bad. I was really looking forward to it but it delivered on absolutely no fronts. Acting was bottom of the barrel, script was a complete mess, cinematography was cut and dry, even the kills were nowhere near as good as the original.
Now, onto the personal stuff:
I'm admittedly a bit unsure of what direction I want to move in going forward. I've considered setting up a Patreon as commissions are pretty sporadic for me and a more reliable source of income would give me some set goals to achieve outside of commissions. I'm not sure if the sparse commissions are down to my methodology, though. Maybe I should be making a journal with commission slots to make things more clear? Maybe I'm not promoting my ability to do commissions enough? Maybe my prices are too low or too high? Maybe I don't have enough pricing options for commissions? A lot of possibilities.
Another problem is I post exclusively on FA atm. Every person I've interacted with here has been fantastic but looking at statistics for my own works it seems like discoverability is really difficult to attain on this site. Admittedly I don't have enough experience with other sites to say that this is an FA-specific problem, but it seems as though the only way to get anyone to look at your art is to drive yourself into a specific niche. My transformation pieces do significantly better than any of my pin-up pieces, as an example. I greatly enjoy doing transformation pieces (don't get me wrong) but it's a bit disheartening that my more compositionally artistic pin-ups fall a bit flat. I greatly appreciate those that do look at 'em and leave nice comments, but I feel like I'm monetarily incentivized not to bother. Maybe my problem here just comes down to the classic capitalism vs artistic expression problem, tbh.
Another thing I greatly enjoy doing is adoptables, and I know there's a dedicated market for it... but my last adoptable got very little attention. This could very easily be that my adoptable just wasn't that interesting, but I also feel like I didn't give it the best chance. I've noticed people posting reminders for adoptables which is probably something I'll incorporate into the next batch I make. Another thing I'm not sure about is pricing. A full reference sheet for 100$ is really selling myself short and I'd prefer not to go down that route again. This time I think I'm just doing a single full illustration with a bonus simplified sheet that just explains any important information that isn't available in that illustration. That way even if I end up selling at the base price I'll feel a bit more justified.
Unrelated to anything up there, but man - the Candyman sequel was so bad. I was really looking forward to it but it delivered on absolutely no fronts. Acting was bottom of the barrel, script was a complete mess, cinematography was cut and dry, even the kills were nowhere near as good as the original.
I feel like moving out to twitter aswell, just to get reach..
Probably couldn't hurt to branch out to other platforms as well. That or sharing your art in discord servers could help generate interest.