Good morning all you lovely people!
As always I want to start by thank everyone who’s been so supportive the last few months, sharing my work and ordering commissions! You all are why I’m able to keep doing what I do!

Some big things have happened this last couple months, and I want to take the time to let everyone know what’s been up!

The roadblocks:
As many of you had probably noticed, I spent quite a few months silent and stressed. I’m not quite out of it, but I’m able to be a lot more productive right now than I was during January and February.
I don’t want to focus too much on things that happened before January, so here’s what’s been going on since the new year.

As some of you are aware I had an emergency dental situation that took most of January and February to handle. Due to the excruciating pain I was in I was unable to keep up with work during those months, and a good portion of March since I was recovering from my final dental surgery. I tried to do what I could, but between Jan and Feb I only managed to complete three or four commissions, and I wasn’t able to keep up with marketing and such; Which led to February being the lowest income month for me in three years, only making a grand total of $300 that month.

It was incredibly stressful, and I went into March feeling pretty terrible; My mental health was also at an all-time low for a bit there.
I felt like I was drowning, I didn’t have the energy or physical ability to work, and on top of that in January my work laptop started dying on me.
As the months progressed the laptop issue started getting worse and worse, and more and more kept falling through the cracks.

By the start of March, I was so heavily backlogged on commissions that my longest waiting one was from June of last year; Insanity. I feel so bad for the people that had to wait so long to get their pieces from me (all of these issues I’ve been fighting through, though, began right around June last year, though, so there’s only so much I can actually say about that; it’s been one roadblock after another for almost a solid year).

Anyway, when march hit things started to go better! So here are the positive updates!
Starting at the beginning of march, I got an influx of commissions that turned my finances back around and put me back in the green. Because I was doing so much better, I decided to take the opportunity to create a GoFundMe and spend the time trying to get my computer replaced. This GoFundMe was met with such amazing response that by the end of March I was almost ready to put the order in, but not just for a basic replacement computer. I managed to get myself a nice sexy upgrade, a gaming computer with a 6GB dedicated RAM GPU as well as an i7 processor. I’m typing this up on the new workbeast and I’m so happy about it!

But that wasn’t the only thing that turned around. Because there was such a hugely positive response and my finances turned around so much so suddenly, despite being a little overwhelmed, I also managed to recover a bit from the burnout that I’d been suffering through since last August, and for the first time since October, I completed over 10 commissions in a month (15 total in March), which helped me catch up a TON.
On top of catching up a good deal on commissions, I managed to finally get all of my merch locked in and functioning on my Patreon and managed to get MONTHS worth of content scheduled in advance on my Youtube channel.

I still have a few commissions from last year waiting on me, and I’m hoping to get them finished soon, however I’m still facing a pretty large roadblock (albeit a positive one).

In January I was hired on by an upstart tabletop RPG company called FGG Games, who will be taking their website live soon, to do a series of in-book maps for their upcoming RPG campaign setting. I have not been told the name of the campaign setting, only that it will not be associated with the DnD or Pathfinder game system. This project has been a massive undertaking for me, compared to all of the one-off commissions I’ve done over the years, and it’s going amazingly well, however the deadline is the end of April and I have a lot of work to do between now and then on it.

Along with FGG Games, I’ve been taken on by the band Legion of Adonai, also an upstart, to create all of the art assets required for the band. This means their new logo, a slew of album art, as well as the lyric videos for a few of their upcoming songs. My work with Legion of Adonai has also garnered me some album art work with a couple other bands, all of which are on fairly tight deadlines.

Because of the nature of these projects, it’s a little harder to catch up on commissions aside from them; I’m currently juggling 2-3 large projects at once for these clients, that all have a much tighter deadline than I’m used to. Which is not to say I’m not continuing to get other projects done, as I’m making sure to take time after each larger project to pound out one or two of the backlog pieces, and at this point I’ve ALMOST caught up to current on my commission list.

I want to thank those of you waiting for commissions for your patience, as this has been a fairly long road for me, and it’s been incredibly frustrating for me seeing everything pile up on me like this with seemingly no way out from under it, but if things continue to go how they are currently I’ll be out from under it all and back to my usual 2-week turnaround for all clients.