FA+
Shop
Nerve (General Update 🗞️) Comms likely opening weeknd
7 months ago
Hey everyone! This one contains the following:
1. work status and schedule,
2. health update/deeper explanation of my primary ailment and how I aim to fix it and
3. some odds and ends kind of unrelated but which I guess were on my mind this month (not related to comms). As always, there's tl;dr at the bottom.
1. Work status this month is as follows: I got a little behind on the in-streams, they'll still all be done this week I think, but a few things conspired against me this month, mainly that the apartment's AC conked out (I live in the South) and took several weeks before I could get the maintenance person to come take a look at it (live in a shitty poor people apartment after all).. work conditions were kinda inhospitable for several weeks there, but tried my best! By periodically taking ice cold showers I could keep myself from overheating lol. Also basically ended up reversing my sleep schedule so I could work during the night when it was cool, which is extremely bad for sleep quality. Anyway because of how hot it would get when I streamed I just had to stop doing for it for a while. Didn't sit on my hands though, I swear! Got a number of pics from the backlog completed, and a few WIPs well along the way, some of which were very overdue indeed. So little behind on in-streams and patreon, but a little ahead on backlog? Have gotten 4 and a half pics from the backlog completed in the last 3 weeks on top of the in-streams I've managed to get done. However, I do have to focus on the monthly obligations for the rest of the month.
Will probably stick to last month's schedule going forward, because I can't keep working 7 days a week. Physically, mentally, I can't keep it up. This means that during the first two weeks of the month the likelihood that I will have updates on backlog WIPs is basically zero, just a heads up. Expect WIPs and finished pics to roll out again middle to end of next month.
Week 1-2: In-stream comms
Week 3-4: patreon pinup + Backlog
Will start taking applications for next month's in-streams soon, once I get some more headway on the current batch I'll open on patreon/discord, then publicly after that.
2. Some stuff on general health/burnout status (feel free to skip):
Don't want these updates to be a vehicle for my various complaints and ailments, which to me often feel like making excuses, but at the same time I do feel the need to explain why things are taking so long and how they it got as bad as it did (this will sound kind of negative at first but it's going somewhere positive dw). The root of it is basically this. I fucked up my rotator cuff pretty early into my art journey, all the way back in early 2013... and it's basically never gotten better. I'd draw for 12 hours a day in college, then after graduation, I'd work menial repetitive jobs working cash registers, making lattés, pulling cages of french fries out of fryers.. then come home to practice drawing for the remaining waking hours. Then once I quit wagie life and went full time with art it was right back to drawing 12 hours a day, for years on end. Long story short this problem kept getting worse, with no time to get better. No exaggeration, every second spent drawing over the last 10+ years has been physically painful, at times excruciatingly so. Also the time not spent drawing has often been pretty painful too, it's a chronic condition. I don't really talk about this much, because it's kind of a bummer, but it's a major component of the stress and burnout, and one of the more difficult ones to solve. The fact that every single brush stroke is physically painful leads to a lot of negative reinforcement, which takes me out of a creative headspace/flowstate, which causes pics to take longer, which stresses me out, which leads to other problems like poor sleep and lack of focus, which worsen the art, which increases the amount of time spent fixing the errors.... you get the picture. It's been a negative feedback loop, where the injury causes me to fall behind, and the periods where I play catchup cause me to injure it more. Anyway, this all reached somewhat of a breaking point last December, when I was quite literally in too much pain to work, and having daily full-on panic attacks over this fact. This lasted for weeks. I stopped sleeping, I stopped eating, I started behaving very erratically. But above all I realized things couldn't go on as they were, so I had to make some drastic changes. New pricing, new sona, new emphasis on personal art and new work schedule. As drastic and sudden as some of these changes were, a lot of things have taken a very long time to implement. I'm still not practicing or doing much personal work yet. I only recently got over the insomnia, and restoring my shoulder back to health is going to be a very long term pursuit due to the extent of the damage. But as mentioned in the previous update, I picked up a yoga mat in order to start taking the rehab seriously with the goal of eventually getting back into calisthenics and isometric exercise and just all around putting my health first.
Effectively here's the issue: a large amount of tension has for years been pulling everything in my drawing shoulder out of place. Tight lats, tight trapezius, tight rhomboids, tight levator scapulae, tight teres major... the tension has caused the whole shoulder region to sink downward basically; my shoulders are at a completely uneven slant. Anatomically, the rotator cuff is threaded by the thoracic nerve, which is one of the big ones, and which is getting clamped down underneath this downward pressure. There's one stretch I do that involves turning my head away while raising my drawing arm and it basically makes the entire right side of my body go numb from head to foot. Yeah, there's a lot of work to do... but I've managed to keep up a routine of daily mobility training and stretching which is gradually easing things back into place. When I finish the daily routine, the mobility and range of motion in my bad shoulder is actually better than in my "good" shoulder, so I'm pretty sure it's doing what it's supposed to. It still hurts, but in different places and in different ways than before I started, which I think is progress. The muscle fibers in my right lat used to be about as taut as a steel cable when I started, but since working on the area they've softened up considerably, easing the downward pull that's been taking place. I'm optimistic about the progress I'm making, but it will take months of consistency to get things to a pain free state, if such a thing is even possible. I've also spent a lot of time this month trying to sort out my tablet settings and brushes to be more ergonomic, which is an ongoing process.
The major hurdle I still have to contend with is that the pain does slow me down, which leads to more time spent at the drawing board than if I was healthy, which makes recovery less likely. So I will have to start taking days off to rest, even though it feels like I'm adding more unnecessary delays to work which is already long overdue, I don't think there's a way around it.
3. Other things I was thinking of writing about at different points this month (feel free to skip this too):
Had two, like, eulogies that I almost wrote this month, weird as that sounds. The first was April 1st being the one year anniversary of the tragic end of the Cartoonist Kayfabe youtube channel (one of the only good yt shows about comics), which was one of very few online shows I watched. It ended in extremely tragic circumstances that I've kind of felt like speaking my mind on for a long time, but has also felt inappropriate to do, since I have extremely mixed feelings and about the whole thing. It involves the intersection of living as an online persona, hustle culture, cancel culture, the overwhelming pressure of full-time content creation and a bunch of other topics too probably, but feels disrespectful to turn the very real circumstances into like a case study. Wish I had the tact to pull it off, but I'm not actually much of a writer. A less serious eulogy would be over the death of 4chan, which is pretty much where I got started doing art online in the first place. I discovered /ic/ (the art and critique board) way, way early, all the way back in 2006 when i was underage b&, and it was the first place that really told me that my art sucked in a major way and I needed to practice (still true unfortunately), which is something valuable I think. In the 10's I cut my teeth artistically, drawfagging on /tg/ and /aco/ and it ended up being where I got started doing commissions. I don't think I would have known where to get my foot in the door otherwise, since I was completely anti social media at the time (wish I still could be tbh). There are other boards that I owe a lot to as well, /mu/ and /lit/ being some of the better discussion boards for their respective topics on the internet at various points in time. It's a site I've barely visited in years, but it's a bit sad to see it go. It was never good as the old adage goes, but all the same, it was a genuine piece of web1.0 culture that felt like a strangely reassuring constant in a growingly de-personalized and corporatized internet. There's not a lot of places left that have their own online culture (FA is still definitely one of them, though), so it's sad when these places go extinct. I could have also written a whole essay on the new version of Midjourney that came out this month as well, which I find alarming for a few reasons, but this post is already way too long, so I'll save it for next month (if I still feel the same way about it then).
tl;dr
-1. schedule got a little messed up this month due to apartment problems
-will still get remaining in-streams out this week in all likelihood, EOM at latest
-need to allow 2 weeks for the in-streams every month instead of 1, so I can start having days to rest (desperately needed)
-finished pics and WIPs from the backlog will go out during the latter half of the month
-next month's batch of comms will probably open this weekend
-2. trying to restore my shoulder to health, due to it being a chronic condition, will take a long time before it's fixed
-how this condition affects my work is the origin of a lot of my difficulties with stress and burnout
-on account of trying to fix it, I will have to consistently start taking days off from working
-3. had some minor thoughts about the deaths of a youtube channel i used to watch and a popular imageboard where my art journey started on
-that's about it for this one?
as always hugs, kisses, etc.
-smokes but sometimes sven
1. work status and schedule,
2. health update/deeper explanation of my primary ailment and how I aim to fix it and
3. some odds and ends kind of unrelated but which I guess were on my mind this month (not related to comms). As always, there's tl;dr at the bottom.
1. Work status this month is as follows: I got a little behind on the in-streams, they'll still all be done this week I think, but a few things conspired against me this month, mainly that the apartment's AC conked out (I live in the South) and took several weeks before I could get the maintenance person to come take a look at it (live in a shitty poor people apartment after all).. work conditions were kinda inhospitable for several weeks there, but tried my best! By periodically taking ice cold showers I could keep myself from overheating lol. Also basically ended up reversing my sleep schedule so I could work during the night when it was cool, which is extremely bad for sleep quality. Anyway because of how hot it would get when I streamed I just had to stop doing for it for a while. Didn't sit on my hands though, I swear! Got a number of pics from the backlog completed, and a few WIPs well along the way, some of which were very overdue indeed. So little behind on in-streams and patreon, but a little ahead on backlog? Have gotten 4 and a half pics from the backlog completed in the last 3 weeks on top of the in-streams I've managed to get done. However, I do have to focus on the monthly obligations for the rest of the month.
Will probably stick to last month's schedule going forward, because I can't keep working 7 days a week. Physically, mentally, I can't keep it up. This means that during the first two weeks of the month the likelihood that I will have updates on backlog WIPs is basically zero, just a heads up. Expect WIPs and finished pics to roll out again middle to end of next month.
Week 1-2: In-stream comms
Week 3-4: patreon pinup + Backlog
Will start taking applications for next month's in-streams soon, once I get some more headway on the current batch I'll open on patreon/discord, then publicly after that.
2. Some stuff on general health/burnout status (feel free to skip):
Don't want these updates to be a vehicle for my various complaints and ailments, which to me often feel like making excuses, but at the same time I do feel the need to explain why things are taking so long and how they it got as bad as it did (this will sound kind of negative at first but it's going somewhere positive dw). The root of it is basically this. I fucked up my rotator cuff pretty early into my art journey, all the way back in early 2013... and it's basically never gotten better. I'd draw for 12 hours a day in college, then after graduation, I'd work menial repetitive jobs working cash registers, making lattés, pulling cages of french fries out of fryers.. then come home to practice drawing for the remaining waking hours. Then once I quit wagie life and went full time with art it was right back to drawing 12 hours a day, for years on end. Long story short this problem kept getting worse, with no time to get better. No exaggeration, every second spent drawing over the last 10+ years has been physically painful, at times excruciatingly so. Also the time not spent drawing has often been pretty painful too, it's a chronic condition. I don't really talk about this much, because it's kind of a bummer, but it's a major component of the stress and burnout, and one of the more difficult ones to solve. The fact that every single brush stroke is physically painful leads to a lot of negative reinforcement, which takes me out of a creative headspace/flowstate, which causes pics to take longer, which stresses me out, which leads to other problems like poor sleep and lack of focus, which worsen the art, which increases the amount of time spent fixing the errors.... you get the picture. It's been a negative feedback loop, where the injury causes me to fall behind, and the periods where I play catchup cause me to injure it more. Anyway, this all reached somewhat of a breaking point last December, when I was quite literally in too much pain to work, and having daily full-on panic attacks over this fact. This lasted for weeks. I stopped sleeping, I stopped eating, I started behaving very erratically. But above all I realized things couldn't go on as they were, so I had to make some drastic changes. New pricing, new sona, new emphasis on personal art and new work schedule. As drastic and sudden as some of these changes were, a lot of things have taken a very long time to implement. I'm still not practicing or doing much personal work yet. I only recently got over the insomnia, and restoring my shoulder back to health is going to be a very long term pursuit due to the extent of the damage. But as mentioned in the previous update, I picked up a yoga mat in order to start taking the rehab seriously with the goal of eventually getting back into calisthenics and isometric exercise and just all around putting my health first.
Effectively here's the issue: a large amount of tension has for years been pulling everything in my drawing shoulder out of place. Tight lats, tight trapezius, tight rhomboids, tight levator scapulae, tight teres major... the tension has caused the whole shoulder region to sink downward basically; my shoulders are at a completely uneven slant. Anatomically, the rotator cuff is threaded by the thoracic nerve, which is one of the big ones, and which is getting clamped down underneath this downward pressure. There's one stretch I do that involves turning my head away while raising my drawing arm and it basically makes the entire right side of my body go numb from head to foot. Yeah, there's a lot of work to do... but I've managed to keep up a routine of daily mobility training and stretching which is gradually easing things back into place. When I finish the daily routine, the mobility and range of motion in my bad shoulder is actually better than in my "good" shoulder, so I'm pretty sure it's doing what it's supposed to. It still hurts, but in different places and in different ways than before I started, which I think is progress. The muscle fibers in my right lat used to be about as taut as a steel cable when I started, but since working on the area they've softened up considerably, easing the downward pull that's been taking place. I'm optimistic about the progress I'm making, but it will take months of consistency to get things to a pain free state, if such a thing is even possible. I've also spent a lot of time this month trying to sort out my tablet settings and brushes to be more ergonomic, which is an ongoing process.
The major hurdle I still have to contend with is that the pain does slow me down, which leads to more time spent at the drawing board than if I was healthy, which makes recovery less likely. So I will have to start taking days off to rest, even though it feels like I'm adding more unnecessary delays to work which is already long overdue, I don't think there's a way around it.
3. Other things I was thinking of writing about at different points this month (feel free to skip this too):
Had two, like, eulogies that I almost wrote this month, weird as that sounds. The first was April 1st being the one year anniversary of the tragic end of the Cartoonist Kayfabe youtube channel (one of the only good yt shows about comics), which was one of very few online shows I watched. It ended in extremely tragic circumstances that I've kind of felt like speaking my mind on for a long time, but has also felt inappropriate to do, since I have extremely mixed feelings and about the whole thing. It involves the intersection of living as an online persona, hustle culture, cancel culture, the overwhelming pressure of full-time content creation and a bunch of other topics too probably, but feels disrespectful to turn the very real circumstances into like a case study. Wish I had the tact to pull it off, but I'm not actually much of a writer. A less serious eulogy would be over the death of 4chan, which is pretty much where I got started doing art online in the first place. I discovered /ic/ (the art and critique board) way, way early, all the way back in 2006 when i was underage b&, and it was the first place that really told me that my art sucked in a major way and I needed to practice (still true unfortunately), which is something valuable I think. In the 10's I cut my teeth artistically, drawfagging on /tg/ and /aco/ and it ended up being where I got started doing commissions. I don't think I would have known where to get my foot in the door otherwise, since I was completely anti social media at the time (wish I still could be tbh). There are other boards that I owe a lot to as well, /mu/ and /lit/ being some of the better discussion boards for their respective topics on the internet at various points in time. It's a site I've barely visited in years, but it's a bit sad to see it go. It was never good as the old adage goes, but all the same, it was a genuine piece of web1.0 culture that felt like a strangely reassuring constant in a growingly de-personalized and corporatized internet. There's not a lot of places left that have their own online culture (FA is still definitely one of them, though), so it's sad when these places go extinct. I could have also written a whole essay on the new version of Midjourney that came out this month as well, which I find alarming for a few reasons, but this post is already way too long, so I'll save it for next month (if I still feel the same way about it then).
tl;dr
-1. schedule got a little messed up this month due to apartment problems
-will still get remaining in-streams out this week in all likelihood, EOM at latest
-need to allow 2 weeks for the in-streams every month instead of 1, so I can start having days to rest (desperately needed)
-finished pics and WIPs from the backlog will go out during the latter half of the month
-next month's batch of comms will probably open this weekend
-2. trying to restore my shoulder to health, due to it being a chronic condition, will take a long time before it's fixed
-how this condition affects my work is the origin of a lot of my difficulties with stress and burnout
-on account of trying to fix it, I will have to consistently start taking days off from working
-3. had some minor thoughts about the deaths of a youtube channel i used to watch and a popular imageboard where my art journey started on
-that's about it for this one?
as always hugs, kisses, etc.
-smokes but sometimes sven
Guilt over "missed" work is probably the #1 killer of modern artists.
I agree with that, trying to take proactive steps to reduce that feeling, as it ironically enough interferes with getting the work out.