I haven't been very active lately and I want to address this so you know what's going on and how I plan to move ahead.

In short, I have lost all motivation to work on anything art related. I can't even open blender without feeling dread.

Doing commissions and/or payed work has been an incredibly demotivating and draining experience for me. The main problem is that I try to give it my all and try to live up to some impossible standard because I am a perfectionist, and I end up doing way too much work for the price that we agree on.

Take Pink Abyss for example. The amount of work that went into that project was around 200+ hours spanning 5-6 months, and all it cost was 150$. I try to tell myself that I don't care about money, that being able to express myself is what matters. Which is something I do believe in, except it doesn't feel true when you put a price on it. Yes, I can still express myself within the boundaries of the commissionee's requirements, but it's very hard to do all of this work with someone bossing you around about things you need to change and get payed so little and not feel like I was exploited. Did Pagan (the person who commissioned Pink Abyss) have exploitative intentions? No. Do I hate him for it? Of course not. It was my (poor) perfectionist's choice that lead to the project taking so long. In a way, Pagan is lucky to be the first person to have commissioned me, because there is no way anyone will ever get something like that out of me again for such a low price.

Take my recent involvement with Ponut Party 6 (Ponut Pack) as another example. Again, I bit off way more than I could chew. I started working on that project in the beginning of October. Come February 13th, I was still not done. Skunk (or Mittsies, not sure who made the decision) decided to pay me only 50% of what the other involved artists would receive due to it not being done. It's kind of a shitty situation, because on one hand I can agree with this decision, but on the other hand, it feels really unfair because of how many hours of work went into the project compared to the rest of the artists on the pack. And even if I had received the full cut, it wouldn't be close to justifying all of the work that went into the project. Don't get me wrong though. The opportunity to work on a Ponut Pack is an honor and if I could rewind time, I'd have taken the offer to work on it again. I would have made the animation shorter and lower quality to fit it into that short time frame, though.

I started making art because I wanted to express myself, and somehow, I've become a slave to the commissionee. I realize this, and moving forward, I will not be offering any more large scale animation projects for commission. Instead, I will try to return to what I care about, which is working at my own pace on ideas that I enjoy doing. It's simply impossible for me to create animations like Tug of Vore, Pink Abyss, or Crap'o'Lantern for "affordable" prices.

I will be offering fart edits for commission, but in order to match the low price tag that people are expecting (50$-80$), they're not going to be of the same quality as the ones I've created so far. You get what you pay for, basically.

For now though, I think I just need a break from all of this. I'm taking this month off and we'll see how I feel in April.