Another #MUTED illustration (Patreon)

Hello my gemlins,

I'm posting at a weird time today because my dog once again wouldn't let me sleep : )))))

After my last post, things got derailed a bit again and instead of finishing Shallow Sleep chapter 07+drawing a cover illustration for it......... I ended up spending 5 full days frantically drawing another #MUTED illustration instead.

It's for something I'm doing with Papertoons (my German publisher), that had a pretty close deadline and technically I didn't have to draw something entirely new, we could have just used some old art but I refuse to recycle for bigger, more important things.

It's a huge image, with a lot of details, I think I spent like 50hours on it total OTL Which is very rare for me to do, I usually nope out of a drawing after like 8 hours, lol.

 This is the sketch I started out with and I kept adding more stuff to it as the hours went by, haha.

I finished the piece last night but I need to look at it again later today with fresh eyes because I know there's some corrections I still want to make. Once that's done, I'll show you the full thing.

I'll be getting back to the comic grind immediately, but I'm not sure anymore if I can actually post even one update this month, I still don't even have the cover :( And Fynni has surgery in a couple of days, which is gonna take more work time away from me (and has me stressed out in general because anaesthesia on a 15 year old dog who just had heart problems orz)

Ngl, part of me wants to pause Shallow Sleep completely for a while and move to different, potentially more profitable projects until I have financially recovered from SS a bit and feel like I can afford to work on this super self-indulgent comic again (that I love working on very much but it just feels like such a dumb move haha) but I also hate leaving things unfinished before doing something else, so that's not gonna happen. I'm commited and I will finish Shallow Sleep until the end of the year (hopefully) and then I move on x _x)

I think it's just the good old burnout-ish state that hasn't gone away fully since last year, the amount of effort I put into life (not just comic work, but in general) doesn't match up with what I get out of it, and new shit keeps popping up every day, so I'm at a bit of a loss, keep working hard anyway but I'm just very tired xDD Sorry for complaining! This will be the last time, I dunno how to really explain these things so I just shouldn't. I promise I'm trying my best even though it very much feels to me that to my audience it must look like I'm doing nothing at all haha. 💦💦💦

I'm working hard to get things in order. I wanna make cool shit, I just need to find ways to put myself in a vacuum or something where nothing can keep stopping and derailing me from my work u _u)

ANYWAY, time to chug coffee and get to work.

Have a wonderful day, everyone. 💜