I don't think I've ever felt hatred like I did yesterday. Least of all directed at myself. I hope I never do again.

This is a retake of the second oldest surviving upload I ever posted. If you're wondering; yes, this is also coincidentally a Deltarune reference. Yes, it is relevant.

The past many months, things have very much Not Let Up for ya girl, and I've been feeling it big time.

For most of this year I've been gearing up to tackle bigger, more exciting projects and finally, properly kickstart this whole endeavour of mine that's kinda been puttering along at a leisurely pace. Unfortunately, what this has mostly achieved was getting me to draw less, while making me more anxious about it because I was falling behind.

I can't and won't get into specifics, but it's genuinely felt like there's been A Crisis or An Event of some form for me to be worrying about, anticipating, or planning ahead of in my life for the past year or so. Were it not for the people close to me, and the amount of support I benefit from every single day, I would not be here writing this post right now.

I don't mean to engage in hyperbole; this is simply the best way to make the point that I have a lot going for me, and yet I still feel like I'm constantly treading water.

I'm genuinely so fucking scared.

There's a lot of reasons why, but I'll speak about just one in the interests of openness and brevity; I want to share a story with you all that I know has permanently damaged me and my ability to commit to long term projects. Yes, I have talked to my therapist about this. No, I haven't seen her in a while, and I can't afford to.

Back in 2018, I went on hiatus. This was because of a job I secured as part of a massive cultural programme where I live, for which I got to produce an art exhibition as a collaboration between artists from here and from Japan. I got the job by recommendation through my then-girlfriend's sister, who later became a manager within the company, and its production was admittedly somewhat fraught. I had to put my personal work entirely on hold, following which I spent a good 4-5 months catching up on a backlog of rewards I owed my patrons. Even then, I wasn't confident that I'd get it done at all, never mind completed to the level of quality that I was hoping for.

That said; it was a huge success at the end of it all, and I even heard that the project was a lot less problematic than others that were being worked on at the same time.

One of the exhibits was a live painting performance by one of the Japanese artists. It was a beautiful show, that resulted in an even more beautiful painting. My dad and I collaborated with her to have it set up just to her liking, and she was grateful enough to gift the canvases to us, as they would be too expensive to ship back.

The day before, I was stood in front of them even as the ink was still drying, talking to my girlfriend's sister - and manager - about it. She said "if she leaves this behind, I have first dibs," which I nervously laughed off. In that moment, sat across the table to this wonderful artist, I was torn in half: immeasurable gratitude on one side, and inconceivable anxiety on the other.

The year of stress and six months of blood, sweat and tears I poured into what still remains my life's greatest creative achievement all came to fruition for that weekend, and left me with an amazing sense of pride and relief.

That lasted less than a week.

My girlfriend's sister came to know about the canvases, and she got so upset that she wouldn't talk to me for months afterwards, causing a rift in the family that made me feel afraid to spend time with them; something they did extremely regularly. She felt unappreciated for the damage control she'd apparently done behind the scenes with upper management, while the exhibition was still in production - especially since I neglected to mention her or her team when I gave the opening speech.

Most anything I've invested more than a couple of hours, across a week or two at most, has been hard to do, and then never been a victory that's lasted long for me. Something has always come up right afterwards that completely takes the wind out of my sails, and prematurely ends my revelry in what I'd achieved. My RSD and negativity bias makes it hard for me to see past that initial shock and disappointment, and by the time I've gotten past that hurt, the afterglow from my achievement has long since faded. This happened again quite recently.

This is a chronic issue I've dealt with for longer than I'd care to admit - the Final Boss of delayed gratification, as it were - and it's genuinely, immeasurably stunted my career path and progress with taking on more ambitious, and frankly, lucrative projects that have lived, gathering dust, in my notebooks and WIP folders for years and years and years.

I appreciate you all for your unending patience and belief in me, but I have to confess that the faith I have in myself that has carried me this far has started to slip rather drastically, in ways that I'm struggling to reconcile with, and work through on a daily basis. I worry about the sheer excess of support from people and connections I've sought out in order to feel like I can stay afloat enough to do my part and follow through; never mind keeping up with what people may expect of me in return.

I'm going to keep fighting as best I can. For right this moment, though, I'm very much at a low point that I'm desperate to look back on someday, hopefully soon, and feel grateful for having overcome.

Even if I genuinely can't yet see the path I'm going to take to get myself there.

Not a lot in this Doodle Pack, because they'll mostly feature in another couple of upcoming posts up!

This one features a bunny and a sylveon doodle with some new brushes that I've been using for a while now, a puppy called Deakia, and a cushy padded Niko (from OneShot), in both slight and extra baby modes.

But I know there's always a way forward.

I just have to figure out how to convince myself to take it.

I keep finding myself mired in this way. It hurts more acutely the harder I want to create.

Every time I learn and grow, it feels as if I meet myself with the stubbornness and apprehension to match.

Still, I'm determined to see this through. I'm not yet sure how, but I don't see this working out any other way.

I'm aware of the irony of making art to express an inability to make art, but this is a form of therapy that's free and available to me; so I'm going to continue using it.

My little baby treasure, Fae, had a surprising experience at BFC 2024.

If you know much of anything about her (and if you've been here a while, you should), you'll know that she's an especially small, precious little darling. However, she somehow discovered that she could - and did - get even littler while having the space to explore those feelings more intently at the con.

She asked me to illustrate this a little while after then, which we've already seen some of the effects of in another similarly themed piece for my friend Malachyte.

So I did the logical thing and made her even littler.

Hi friends and supporters.

First of all, I'd like to put out feelers to test a new idea: Yearly Subscriptions! Quick and easy rundown: pay upfront for a year's subscription at the tier you'd like, and get a discount off of it. I've not put any time into sussing out exact numbers, but if you're at all interested, either leave a comment below or contact me via my socials.

At the same time, I wanted to get a quick word out that I have and will be readjusting the tier rewards on my site to better reflect what I can - and have been able to - actually offer in return for your patronage.

The biggest changes to note are that I've dialled back commission discount rates (from 0%, 5%, 12%, 20% to 0%, 3%, 7%, 15%), effective from when I next reopen my queue, and will be giving early access to finished commission work to Tier 2+ patrons, rather than all patrons.

Another rework that'll be made in due time will be to the "YCH slot" reward since my commission queue has already been a struggle to maintain (and which I am working on fixing), but I'm hoping to shift focus off of art made to order, and onto ongoing work that more people can enjoy.

As I gear up towards doing regular, long-form story oriented and comic work again, I similarly intend to offer early access of some kind to it to Tier 2+ patrons. This may change, but the lists of rewards should already reflect this for the sake of clarity.

I know the exclusion of the base tier may disappoint people, but I've had to look very seriously at how sustainable my workflow is, and being entirely blunt, it isn't. As much as I'd love to share my work without such caveats, I need to work within the system and make it worthwhile for me if it's ever going to happen.

Thank you for understanding.

This is a journal; This is a confession; This is exasperation; This is desperation; This is a cry for help; This is catharsis; This is therapy; This is praxis.

Is this melodramatic? It probably is, but I don't care.

Whatever it is, I'm simply fed up with the state of things surrounding my art: the world around me, the community it's a part of, my work ethic, headspace, disabilities, and mental illness. I decided to make something about it on the off chance that saying the things inside my head out loud might help to dislodge something that's been severely jamming up the works.

I'm sorry that I'm like this, and I'd prefer it if I wasn't; but I likewise wish things could have been better for me and my art in a thousand little ways that have all added up over the years of me doing this.

Consider this a plea for anyone who can help in any way, to do so - while acknowledging at the same time that I am part of "anyone," and that I've been trying my hardest to do so, too. I need reliable, consistent work, I need patrons, and I need reassurance that people will care about the things I truly want to make so that I'll be okay.

I obviously understand very well that I am ultimately the one most responsible for myself, and while acknowledging my own limits, I want to do better. Ideally, the best that I can.

I just need more help, because ultimately; I'm still only one bun.

Here's the whole parade!

In no particular order, grouped by flag, we have; Tiff, DC, Chase, Bliss, Indigo, Joe, Winter, Kaycee, Spid, Kenny, Sophie, Halley, Juniper, Artyc, and Musa.

A couple of extras for me and mine; including my adorable, blushy baby Fae flying the flag I picked for her.

Following the success of the Easter bonanza, I've decided to try to make these a semi-regular monthly thing, especially for times that are known for their theming! I might miss June, but April and May are especially fun times for me, so I'm glad I got to do them both justice.

Here's all of this month's participants in no particular order; Girs, Frocta, James, Abby, Maxwell, Nylia, Song, Anna, Kauko, Zor, and Pepper - for whom, if I'm not mistaken, this is the first adult adult piece of their fursona!

As I'm likely to make a tradition moving forward, I included myself in the fun in a couple of ways, too. Fae happened to get roped into things along the way, but she didn't mind. Not that she had much of a choice, anyway.

The first and most important thing I need to stress about this piece, is that it comes from a good place.

This feels like a spiritual successor to Smoke, upping the ante to a ridiculous degree, but in a way that's fit for purpose as I've been striving to do better and, frankly, live up to my potential.

I started work on this at the end of a very intense day full of feelings; most of them positive. I had a moment of clarity of what it is that I do for a living - pursuing a life that I wish for myself and then relaying, as best I can, the experiences, thoughts, and emotions that come about from it through my art, all so that others may learn from, or at the very least, feel seen by it.

This is a rather exhausting cycle of intense, consistent vulnerability that I'm proud to have maintained and made good on in the ways that I do, at least to some degree, but the reality of it hit me like a truck. For years now, I've been desperately seeking out any way for this to be a sustainable endeavor, on several counts, despite the strongest, most visceral desire deep within me being:

To cut myself open and show everyone as much as I can of what's inside.
It may come at a very heavy price, but to me, it's worth it,
because it feels so damn good for me to be seen, understood, and appreciated that way.

This one happened to land in my lap after reading more of the book "The Creative Act" by Rick Rubin, and a concept mentioned in one of the chapters on self-doubt resonated perfectly with another that had crossed my mind when I saw these two, while browsing the tweegeemee bot's backlog.

In Buddhism, the concept of "Papancha," or "conceptual proliferation," can be summed up - rather inadequately, I should note - as a "preponderance of thoughts and feelings." I would urge you to read up about it if this art resonates at all; but considering how being full of such things almost at all times, to where regulating is so very hard for me, is pretty much my baseline, this felt worth expressing in this strange, collaborative medium I've found for myself.

The spark hit during one particularly, positively overwhelming moment while streaming, and I had to follow through on it.