burnout 3: takedown, and con/artist alley dates (Patreon)

i wish it was as fun as the game. you've probably noticed i've not posted much around here for the last 2 months. the first reason is that i was super busy with some paid work i had to take and the second is that beyond that work i simply couldn't bring myself to draw anything.

the problem is... that i still can't. there's no two ways about it: i am burnt the hell out.

i've been doing this, freelance art, in whatever form that exists in, for about eight years now. eight years of every day essentially being wednesday. the week never really starts or ends, i never really have a 'weekend', holidays are sort of a suggestion. i'm, obviously, very fortunate to be in a situation where i set my own schedule and do what i love doing but the adage is a lie. if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life? buddy, if you do that, then the thing you love just becomes work.

there's so many forces at play here. doing the 'art' thing has become exhaustively strenuous over the past few years thanks to general enshitification of everything we use to put our art out there. AI scraping, payment processors, Patreon et. all's chase of endless growth, covid just screwing everyone's sense of place up, Twitter, etc. The toll it has taken is immeasurable but it's real. I wish I could say it doesn't get to me but it does, even with all of you here as my safety net.

I don't really draw in my free time anymore and for a long time that's been because of health concerns but now... it's mostly that it's so mentally taxing to push through that I stow my tablet away when I'm done for the day so I can forcibly do something else.

The only time I've felt differently recently is working on comics. The entire process is so much fun, it's so invigorating to tackle multiple disciplines into one final thing. But the comics I make are NSFW, I don't have much of an interest to branch out of that, and I can't justify doing that full time because as some of you will know, trying to make money as an 18+ artist right now is more or less impossible.

I've spent the last couple months being really itchy to get back into game development but the last few years have gotten me in a really stagnant place with that. I don't know how to use Unity anymore, I can't code, and the time it'd have taken me to learn all that stuff throughout the last couple years was instead spent just sorta slowly spiraling into my current headspace now. I have a really exciting thing lined up but it's not a full time thing--neither of us on the project want it to be. But I don't know if I have much of a choice at this point.

There's not much structure to my thoughts here, I'm sorry. The honest truth is that it will probably take me quite a while to recover. I don't know how I will. I want to love drawing again, I want to be brimming with ideas constantly. I want to be able to sit down at any moment and just bang something out, good or bad, and feel great because I put something new into the world. Right now, I mostly just sit at my desk in the morning and immediately feel nauseous because a blank canvas feels like a deep vortex that sucks me in as i try to run away.

I have a little under a week of free time before EVO, and then about another week until I table at Anirevo here in Vancouver. I think I will mostly try and spend that time doing... whatever makes me not miserable. Games, either streaming or not, movies, going outside, writing.

When I'm not busy prepping for convention stuff I want to make another thread of bunny suit girls because y'all are overdue. I'm just gonna take everyone's suggestions and go through em all with sketches. It was a lot of fun to do last time. But right now I just need to not be in my own head.

Convention Dates

That said,

If you're going to be at EVO 2024, I will be there with Lena! We'll be spending our time there with friends as they participate in pools but if you see us, absolutely feel free to say hi.

If you're in Vancouver, I will be at Minicomi 2024 this weekend (July 13) which is free to enter! I will also be tabling at Anirevo 2024 on August 9-11. I'll be selling prints and merch, so if you're in the area come by and say hi and buy some stuff!

Thanks as always for supporting me, even in the pits of despair like this. It will get better. Things always get better. It's just the roughest low I've maybe had so far and when I pick back up, it'll be because y'all were there to catch and help as always.

💖