>_> Over the next week I'll be doing a huuuuuge art dump for 2020. I needed time away but didn't stop drawing or working on commissions but 2020 was a strange and unique year.

I have a heap of artwork saved in a 2020 upload folder ready to go, and I've been told about a mass uploader to help out, so I'll likely figure it out and break it down by month. So with that, I do heavily apologize for the art spam you'll probably see. Once I get myself caught up I'll start posting January 2021s artwork and keep it going.

We stayed in work, kept the roof over our heads but social media became a hard place to be. Politics crossed over with Pandemic and being stuck in between opposing views from all sides makes it uncomfortable. My family are all like minded within themselves and I'm the black sheep of the family, and with friends they're on the opposite side to family - the bickering that comes from social media feeds is enough to make me switch off and walk away - I'm non confrontational, I hate drama and if I can chose not be apart of it, live as drama free as possible. Mental health is such an important issue and I've really been focusing on how to build myself and my work and within 2021 I want to focus on where I have failed as an artist and learn from those mistakes.

Making mistakes isn't a terrible thing sometimes if you take the time to reflect and learn from your problems.

I worked hard on PawPrinting, learned everything I could get my hands on, made great vendor relationships but over time found that my machines would break often. Fulfilling large orders of prints and items I would quote a certain amount for (and rightly so stand by that quote and not ask for extra to cover costs) if the printer would go nuts I then spent double, and in one order triple, the quote cost on making sure what I made was perfect. While I might be a perfectionist within myself, I like the idea of providing something that I'd be proud to have. Within that failure, even though I still do printing for smaller quantities, I took what I could do and what I learned and put that into my Patreon and treat Patreon as a secondary business. It was successful printing metal trading cards and making stickers each month, then at Christmas being able to splurge and go nuts on making random items to give to my followers - I loved that and still do. If I didn't fail in PawPrinting I wouldn't have been able to see another use for the same machinery.

That then lent itself to etsy - while the pandemic hit I wanted to make facemasks before facemasks were a needed thing but found that nosewires and what people were thinking of using weren't built for purpose so I went through my random craft stock and took a few weeks to design a new concept and start building, and it's taken off. I had Etsy previously and it failed miserably, eventually to where I took it down completely, but that gave me the knowledge on what to do, where I could take what I learned from Pawprinting, Patreon and reapply both to Etsy. One of the reasons for radio silence here is how often I'm not at the PC is I'm continuing to make nosewires for various crafters around the world. When that need is gone, I'll stop. <3

So my theme here is to continue building on mistakes and failures to try to make something better at the end. 2020 felt like it dragged on but passed by in an instant. It gave me the time I needed to focus on making sure family were safe and sound, find new ways of having fun and really apply what I do to try and better myself as an illustrator and business person. The distance and quietness from me wasn't out of dislike or distaste for FA, or other social medias, but I'm now doing better today than I had been at the start of 2020, and that time spent away ended up being more of a blessing than a curse.

So while my late to the party "Happy New Year" post is half a month late, I truly hope that you and yours are well, that you're staying safe and know that one little owl in the middle of England thinks you're pretty spiffy.
Lots of love.
-Lappy