Hey, all! It's been a few months since that last update and... well, kind of a lot and not a lot have happened since then. It's been a wild ride, and a boring one, all at once. One without a lot of chances to sit back and appreciate what's going on.
I gotta say, despite the 40 hours I'm now missing out of every week, I'm still getting a good bit of art done. The Note 8 I got has really helped me keep doing art even when I'm not at home/sitting at my computer. Not only did I do that wintery Rudi pic (which honestly competes with the Moska D&D one for the #1 spot for the best art I've done all year) and the cute Plessie and some rat porn, I've also been able to develop a bunch of characters and ideas for a cartoon show that would be within the canon of Bit's universe. I still don't really have a name for my familiar canon, but I have a ton of scattershot ideas and stories and characters, and now a cartoon in that universe, too. All fodder for possible future projects or just cool drawings, really who knows. Point being, between the phone and my usual tablet arting, I'm actually pretty happy with how much work I'm still putting out.
On the tablet front... if anyone has been following me since like 8 years ago or some ridiculous time back, I went through this whole ordeal trying to get a good art tablet I could use to do my digital art. Crazy thing is, I went through even more of an ordeal trying to get a decent one throughout November and December. Had to return a Microsoft Surface Book and a Galaxy Book 12, both amazing tablets but both teaching me the lesson that Microsoft's crappy Windows Ink drivers are basically ubiquitous now, and few if any tablets actually use Wacom drivers, even if they have Wacom pen tech. Lots of frustration and maddening issues all around led me to have to return each one, and I finally caved and threw down like $2000 to get a Mobilestudio Pro 13. Really wanted a ~$1000 tablet to bridge the gap so I had something nice to work on and I could just get the super nice Wacom stuff later, but in the end it seems if you're already going big, you might as well go all the way. The kind of issues you need to deal with are ridiculous, even moreso given I'd prefer the now quite old Samsung ATIV 700 over their Galaxy Book (which is basically the newest iteration of that tablet), or a $300-400 Chinese tablet (Cube i7 Stylus) over the Surface Book, all because the drivers suck so much.
But to be fair, I really rely on quick access to an 'undo' button in my workflow. On my Note 8 the volume down button makes it accessible enough. Theoretically I could have used some tinkering to do the same on the Galaxy Book. But the pen button is my go-to for that function, it works wonders for me and frankly the volume buttons on a tablet aren't always convenient to keep my hands on constantly. Just keep in mind if you're in the market for one of these things, the Galaxy Book or, if you're adventurous and do some research, Cube's latest Mix Plus tablet, would be my recommendation if you can't drop nearly $2k on a Wacom... but the drivers on Galaxy Book aren't Wacom so stuff like Drawpile actually don't support it at all (Cube Mix Plus should have Wacom drivers, but I'm kind of assuming that's the case... could be wrong) and you can't reassign the pen buttons without a lot of headaches. Radialmenu "kind of" worked for me, but with a LOT of asterisks... not enough to stick with it.
And right, commissions! Those are a thing still, I'm still getting through them... slowly... but to be honest, I've earned about the same amount since starting my job 3 months ago than I earned all year doing commissions. The troublesome thing with commissions was how they always sort of hung over my head. If I spent my time working on anything else, I always had them in the back of my mind as something I should be doing instead. Granted, I'm so glad I wasn't slaving away at Walmart every day and coming home drained, but I never really got to give myself much of a break. I think I did well to keep pumping them out in a timely fashion but now it's stressing me out to know I'm not able to get through them as quickly, and to feel like I'm being 'lazy' allowing myself to work on other things while there are commissions in the queue. Now that it's not a necessity, I'd like to phase them out a bit. Not completely - I'd like to keep commissions open forever and not raise the prices dramatically, but the queue time will stay somewhat high and I'll tend toward only doing ones I'm really interested in. Characters and themes I'm really into will have much better chances, but hopefully those whose ideas are rejected won't feel too bad. That's just how it has to be for me now.
TL;DR: Commissions are still open, not expected to close at all. Queue still needs some time to get cleared out but it's not a focus now so commission turnaround times are 2~3 months-ish. Prices aren't going anywhere yet. Rejection will be a lot more common, and I'll mostly take on ideas that I'm really into. If you share my weird interests or fetishes or want to abuse Iota you're much more likely to end up in the queue~ x3
Sorry for any inane ramblings or incoherent junk, it's late and I shouldn't be typing.
