First a <strong>disclaimer</strong>. This post is a plug for my shop and the one current product I have for sale there. So if you're not interested in purchasing anything, just head back to the blog page.

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The current product in question is this 4-pack of digital sketchbooks:

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Note: this is a digital product, not physical. I do want to offer physical products in the future, but for now have to start simple and low cost.

My ultimate goal as an artist to make it into my career, with the focus of that career being making and selling my own art. Not taking commissions, working for a game studio, doing freelance work, or teaching, just making the art and products I want to make, and selling them. This of course is much easier said than done. So, this single product is my simple and <strong>extremely</strong> humble start.

Back in 2023 I started trying to build the habit of drawing regularly, and building my online. I did have some difficutly keeping consistent with it, but by the end of the year I managed to draw, compile, and assemble 4 digital sketchbooks. I spent a lot of time in Clip Studio EX figuring out how to arrange everything and export into a PDF book file.

Looking back on the art I did for 2023, and the overall quality of these 4 digital sketchooks... they're ok. They're nothing great or even especially good. They're not bad for my first year and first product offering either. Making them was a learning experience, one I hope to do much better with in the future.

This year was unfortunately a bust in terms of my art productivity. There were a lot of reasons for this I may talk about in the future. But I'm aiming to finish the rest of the year as strong as I can, and to really hit 2025 running. I love drawing, and I'll never give it up. While I didn't make any books or products this year, I did still sketch and draw plenty. I may be able to pull all that into something I can offer next year.

I watched the rise of patreon and other support and crowdfunding platforms start accross the internet back when I was getting into art. It was exciting to watch. For years, my ideal plan was to run a patreon page offering monthly digital rewards.

I still consider running a patreon campaign with a single low-priced tier, offering simple exclusive monthly rewards. It's possible I may still do so, either on patreon or on my current Ko-fi account. Ko-fi always for monthly tiers and rewards as well. But admittedly as the years have passed, the idea of monthly subscriptions and tips as the ideal way to make money as an artist has waned heavily for me. It's no longer the way I idealize most to make art my career.

What I really want to do, is make my art and sell it as physical prints and books. I love art prints and art books.

By no means do I mean to argue that tips aren't a legitimate and good way for creatives to make money. They are a legit and respectable way to make money. However, for some personal reason they've never sat well with me as a way <strong>I</strong> want to make money. I don't like tipping people myself, I prefer to buy celarly denoted goods and services, and pay a fair price for those goods and services. And so I want people to buy my products, rather than donate to me because they generally like me or my art. I don't know, again I don't think tips or donations are somehow wrong or anything like that. Just don't prefer them personally. I do have a tendancy to overthink things and get idealistic about things when there's really no reason to.