I should probably post journals more often considering what's featured on my page currently is a closed raffle from over a year ago. So, to freshen things up for what might be a whole extra year of staying featured on my page, I'll drop an update of where I'm at and my thoughts moving forward.

I'll start with the big one, which is my largest project to date. Counting the title page, I have been working on a 7 page tiger transformation comic for the last year. This comic has 40 panels, each of which I have finished lining for both the character and background. All that remains is to finalize the dialogue, then color, shade, and add effects. On paper, that sure seems like a lot, but it certainly won't take 13 months like the concept, sketching, and lining phases. If all goes well, I expect to start weekly uploads of the pages within the next few months.

Next up is a general update to how I will approach art moving forward. For NSFW drawings, I'm going to begin including a SFW version of most, if not all of them. The only exclusions would be posing which is provocative enough that simply turning off the naughty layers doesn't make it feel any less... naughty. If you're curious why I'm choosing to make this change, there are many reasons. One of the major reasons is because I often don't care to look back at my drawings once they're completed, and when I do, I usually don’t want to see those things. I spend so much time on each project that by the time I finish them, the art itself doesn't really do much for me. It's during the creative process of which I experience all of that expression, but by the end of it, the desire to indulge in it further has lost its flair. It feels good in the moment but feels terrible to reflect upon, so I want to adjust my approach to where I give myself an option to actually enjoy my drawings long after they're completed. This is not to say I will no longer draw NSFW, but I want it to be less of a focus in my art because it's too distracting.

The way I'll approach it will be to upload the SFW version first, then the NSFW on the following week. I did a little experimentation with my Halloween wolf drawing by uploading the SFW version to Bluesky on Halloween, I then spent an additional 4 hours over the next few days completing the NSFW version and uploaded it here on TF Tuesday. The first implementation of this here on FA will likely be for a horse drawing that's mostly done, it just needs a background and colors.

A quick side note is that I removed all my NSFW drawings from Bluesky, and I will only be uploading SFW art there. My NSFW art doesn't seem to do as well over there, and I've always felt really uncomfortable uploading it to a website that has a large population of users outside of the community.

Lastly, I'm going to bring up commissions, again... This is something I have wanted to do for a while but the hesitation *still* remains. I've done free sketches to determine whether commissions are a viable option for me, and I think it is. Through that experimentation I have learned that certain subjects make the process really enjoyable and other subjects feel like I'm drawing for the sake of drawing, which I dread. In order to focus on the former, if I do take commissions, I'd likely create a form for people to fill out and then I'd pick out the idea which sounds the most fun to draw, because forcing myself to draw something only for the money would cause burn out. The tiger comic has helped me practice so much that I've managed to cut down the total time of my drawings by about half (depending on the complexity), and time was a major part of my decision making process. With time not concerning me as much, the only thing holding me back now is the money side of things. I have no idea what extra income would do to my taxes, but I also still don't know how to price my art. A thought I've had is to try a YCH auction to gain a better understanding of what people are willing to pay and then to create my pricing model based on that. Overall, commissions are something I want to try - especially because the extra income would be helpful, and I've been making slow but steady progress toward starting them.

Anyways, hope you've had a wonderful New Years, and here's to another year of progress!