Hey there, Oxdarock here!
With the new year fast approaching, I wanted to take a look back at what this year as done for a certain rock. But before that, I want to announce that I’ll be closing commissions indefinitely. I’ve also cancelled my current list and have sent notes to my commissioners regarding this. I deeply apologize for the inconvenience and will explain more behind this decision further down.
Anyway, what has 2017 done for the ol’ OxRock? I’d say that the best term to describe it would be “progression”. I’ve moved on a bit with my Lusty Lamp series, I’ve shaped up my Patreon to a point where it works for me, I’ve moved into a new apartment, and my confidence has boosted a bit. That’s the short version, so let me break it down a bit.
After I started paying a legit set of bills around May 2016 (rent, electric, phone, etc) while living in a warehouse loft my dad rented, after about a year I gained a bit more confidence in that art can succeed as a means of income if done right. I have to stress the “if done right” part because I didn’t exactly have anyone to tell me what exactly I needed to do and made a lot of mistakes in the process that I really could’ve avoided had I realized them sooner. One of those mistakes was the way I handled Patreon.
back in September 2016, I changed my Patreon to a pay-per-post campaign. I still believe it was the right choice, however I made the mistake of taking on more than I could chew. More specifically, I made it so that every update would have at least three comic pages or four illustrations (or a mixture of both), which was a really bad mistake given how long it takes me to produce that amount of content. I’ll never forget the November of that year when I spent nearly the entirety of the month working on the fourth Snapzine, only for it not do nearly as well as I needed it to when it was released. The amount I earned from Patreon after the four updates of November didn’t help too much either. What made it even worse is that around April, I realized that, due to having a pay-per-post campaign, some patrons had set a monthly pledge limit for only a single post. While it doesn’t particularly affect me now (in fact, you could say that it makes my Patreon more flexible), back then it pretty much made all the time I spent in making several pages per update largely pointless and I’d have been much better off spreading it out the way I do now. I’d say that was the lowest I’d been this entire year.
However! Once I realized my mistakes, the next step was to figure out how to fix them! The first step was to largely reduce my workload with the amount of content per paid posts. I also had to stop spending so much time on non-paid exclusive posts, though I’m haven’t exactly decided to not make them either. It’s just a matter of how much finished content I have stashed away at the time. Lastly, I had to make a system that rewarded long time patrons to deal with that monthly limit, the current BEnchmark Rewards System. While there’s not much that I can do about the fact that some patrons don’t pay for all of the posts of the month, this makes it so those that do get a lot more perks. Call it a second reward tier system.
So! At this point in time, I’d say my Patreon’s pretty much where I want it to be. There are some tweaks I still need to make to both give more to my patrons without doing too much and to fill in certain gaps, but it’s doing a lot better than it has in the past. Don’t mistake that statement as me doing particularly well financially though. I’m still skirting the poverty line, have a bit of debt, need my mother to put my apartment in her name since I don’t meet the income requirements, and and have no health insurance. So unless things pick up by the end of 2018, I’m gonna be in a bit of trouble.
Aside from that, as I said, I’ve moved into a new apartment. It’s a nice little studio apartment that I’ve been in for three months now. The bills are actually a bit more than what I can deal with, though thankfully I have a bit of help right now, which gives me some leeway to focus more on Patreon and store content. Because of that however, I haven’t even remotely thought about doing commissions for the last few months. All feelings aside, I’m split between taking time for commissions or making Patreon/store content and since I really want to work on my own stuff , commissions pretty much have to stop (which was the goal of my Patreon in the first place). While I appreciate those who have commissioned me in the past (it’s definitely helped financially and I’ve made some great pictures from them), I really just wanna work on my own stuff. It’s so much more relaxing and a lot less binding. Even if some of the content I work on are patron decided, I still have a lot more freedom with what I draw and have never felt any negative feelings toward them (even if it still takes me forever to finish a picture). Also, even with all the mistakes I’ve made, my Lusty Lamp series has been steadily progressing and it’s my hope to get a lot more done for 2018!
That said, it hasn’t all be great this year though as I’ve officially joined the ranks of people who’ve experienced unfortunate loss in their life as my stepsister, who I’ve lived with for ten years, was murdered on September 23rd. Thankfully the killer was arrested last month, but it doesn’t really change what happened, nor does it help that she had a five year old kid who now lives with my mom and stepdad (his grandpa). I actually feel a bit guilty, mainly due to the fact that my feelings paled in comparison to the rest of her family during the funeral. Still, to this day I feel irritated whenever I think about it and have a hard time being around my stepdad and his grandson due to how bad I feel for them, not to mention I got along well with my stepsister. She made things fun whenever we had a family dinner or game night and was always nice to me. All I can hope for is that she’s in a better place now.
So yeah, that sums up the major events of my life for 2017. My goal for the next year is, of course, to progress even more with my art, the Lusty Lamp, and my Patreon. There’s also another resolution that I made a little bit of progress on throughout the year, but have gotten more dedicated with it over the last week. At this point, it’s less of a resolution and more a requirement if I’m to have a decent chance of increasing my income over the year. The posts for the first three weeks of January of Patreon are done, so I probably won’t be drawing until the 15th, which will give me some time to make some decent headway into it. I won’t say what it is, but it should be very obvious over time.
Anyway, with all that said, let’s start the countdown to 2018! Have a Happy New Year everybody!
