Imagine working in QA for one of those "Try not to CUM while playing this game!" games. You'd have to cum while playing so many times to look for bugs.

ripley & jonesy // 50 minute study from reference

Okay so I'm going to repivot. THIS is me trying to figure out how best to handle GnS because I'm tired of just ambling around with this project unfinished.

The hope is that I can truly commit to this and other projects I have in the pipe.

I wanna draw more art, and better yet, hire some of my friends so they can help draw some art for it!

For more on Grimm and Sons, check out this thread I did! It features the ENTIRE playable line thusfar!

I'm Slowing Down on Commissions.

In September 2020 I quit my job as a retail worker at the Home Depot somewhere in the South Houston area. I had started to make more money doing art online than I was doing work as a retail worker. Funny enough, it was for art commissions; I had hit a point of skill and efficiency that I was able to finish making art at a reasonable rate, and given my point of skill and efficiency I hit a sweet spot.

I was making enough money that I was able to focus on doing art, and I was lucky enough to be in a position where people could support me as I did art; my family was willing to provide shelter so long as I cooked food and cleaned up and basically did my part to keep the house nice. And I was making enough art that I was, frankly, proud of. So I committed.

Since then I've been doing commissions as a primary source of income. It was inconsistent, sure, but I enjoyed it (we'll get back there in a bit). 2022 was my best year on it, making more art pieces than each and every previous year. In fact that was the year that I got my art on the back cover the Liminal Space book, where I was featured in BEACON, where I made well over a hundred pieces not just on commission but for me.

Then 2023 happened. Now that's not to say the year's been completely nonproductive but I've noticeably slowed down. There's a lot of reasons for this.

For one thing, do you remember how 2022 was my best year of doing art? Well dear old Uncle Sam didn't like that. I hadn't spent enough money preparing for my art and despite my deductions I still owed the IRS over $2k, despite barely breaking even on most of my admittedly meager expenses.

The other reason is health problems. I started the year off with an ear infection, and after that I started to experience some severe migraines. Now; I'd had intermittent migraines before. But around that time they got worse, and they were followed up by some tooth aches.

I sought out the dentist. They told me my teeth were fine. They scanned it; they were fine. Examined it, they were fine. Immaculate, even. My teeth were in fantastic condition.

But I had an underbite and some gaps. An underbite and gaps that lead to my teeth resting on top of one another, in just the right way to cause my jaw to grind. My migraine was because of a TMJ misalignment. The solution was braces.

I waited a few months to make sure I had enough money to clear it out. I was sure my dental insurance would cover it, because it was for a medical condition.

It did not. After the age of 19 my insurance considers braces a cosmetic addition.

I am nearly 30. It does not matter what you try to argue.

I am currently paying an additional $393 per month. Now under commissions I could still cover it if I knuckled down and really just ground myself to dust.

But that would leave little money for anything else. And this is where we come back to that little nagging detail that I left out of this earlier story. The problem of consistency.

Commission work is inherently inconsistent.

Commission work, by its very nature, is dependent on other peoples' ability to get their affairs in order.

Art is expensive; it is a luxury good and as such I always prefer to be completely honest with clients. I will consistently tell them that life comes first; art comes second. Art is a luxury, or, if you're making a TTRPG, art is an investment. You do not make luxury payments or an investment unless you are in a solid enough position to do so.

Now commission work for a larger company is perhaps a little more consistent, however...

The current environment for artists is bad.

The current standards, especially in the TTRPG scene, are unsustainable. Paizo in particular is kind of notorious for pretty bad rates.

This is for Jason Rainville, a man who is frankly an art legend in the TTRPG space. That's beneath what I would charge for an equivalent piece in a game. And I could barely sustain myself with the amount of time I would spend on my pieces.

I know people in the comics industry and the rates are dogshit there too. Cover art that runs just over $250-300 or $400. These rates sound pretty okay until you put together the hours it'll take to do some of that cover art; like sometimes up to 20 hours.

$20 an hour for an extremely specialized skillset that, if overdone, will fuck up your wrists. Not might, will. And the demand is that you just keep on doing it.

It's all astonishingly bad. And while I'd love to hire my friends to do art for GnS I cannot in good conscience charge rates that I think are way too low for the labor involved.

This is why I turn towards crowdfunding.

My options are limited, and my own jobsearch is not going as I would hope. I do not want to stop working, I don't want to stop doing art. I'm a speed demon; I like to pump out a lot of art very, very quickly.

Grimm and Sons is a project that @nightmare-works and I have been building for years now. It's a labor of love, for a game system that we enjoy a lot, in a setting we love a lot, with an aesthetic that we think is killer. My hope is to be able to work on this for a longer period of time, and then to eventually be able to publish it.

And then maybe we can work on other projects like it afterwards! I know I've also got ideas cooking with @Samuel-Joseph that I'd like to work on soon.

Eventually I do plan to return to commissions, but at a rate that is more reasonable, at prices that are higher than what I currently charge.

But until then I need to pivot.

Thank you for understanding.

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