I started a Patreon under a different name because I was interested in doing something completely new in order to keep my art from becoming stale. As anyone who has ever made the change from just having fun with something to it being their only source of professional income knows, it’s wonderful to be able to freelance for yourself…and it also becomes a job, and automatically something that you have to do.
I’d always loved 80s pinup art from Luis Royo, Olivia de Berardinis, etc., so I thought that I’d do my own version that centered more on game fan art. I had a blast with it, and even experimented a bit with some totally nsfw stuff which was a lot of fun, but in the end was a bit more problematic for me (trying to come up with a women’s view on porn that wasn’t “male gazey” but in the end wasn’t greatly different in tone. I think women are beautiful, men think women are beautiful, so…yeah.
I also had a tough time, given my current workload, with keeping up with two totally different social media accounts, putting work into everything, and not posting anything with rude bits to my main account. :D Everything takes work if you do it right.
In the end I decided to keep my Patreon, change the name to Ravven, keep some of the pinup stuff but not the real nsfw stuff. Oh, I’ll still do some of it, notably my Dark Alice graphic novel, but I’ll keep the Alice stuff on Gumroad when it’s done and post the miscellaneous saucy stuff on the second deviantART account.
I’ll write more about this tomorrow, but I’ve ideas for what I’d really like to do with it.
- Tarot deck. I’ve always wanted to work on a very lush, dark tarot set and this is one of the projects that I want to set time aside for.
- I’m thinking about a course, split into two sections, for creating art – basically, trying to teach the way that I work. This would be split into 1) Create Your Own Book Covers for writers (because I’ve seen some horrifically bad cover art out there and not everyone can afford to cough up hundreds of dollars each time they release a short story. 2) Creating Fantasy or Pinup Art Using 3D and Postwork – basically, a course on how I do artwork. Posing and rendering a model in Daz, compositing in Photoshop and overpainting.
But more on these projects later. Must think about it. :D