It's been a while, dudes. Figured it was time for another update lol

Last update I did I made mention of some "field tests" I was doing with the test stickers I bought through a third party. Again, just to reiterate, these tests are ultimately useless as I have no idea what kind of equipment that the third party is using and they could be subject to change at a moment's notice, but I figure as long as I buy through them and until I have my own sticker making equipment, it'll be beneficial to some degree to know what kind of quality their materials are, gnome sayin'? I want nothing but the best and will settle for nothing but the best for my supporters lol

That being said, here is the sticker I've had out in the desert sun for 6 months:

All things considered, the image is still somewhat legible. Faded and cracked a bit, caked in dirt some, but still legible after 6 months. I'm happy with it and will be moving on from here. Will mull over some other designs I've made and get the ball rolling on sticker production

I've saved up a small amount of funds to help build an inventory of goods for you guys, now I just gotta get those goods drawn up so I can get them off to the printers lol

There are currently 2 works in progress that I believe will make for some decent desk/card game mats. I'm hoping to have those done before July. If not, I have a few designs already established and posted here on SubStar that I can tweak and send off to the printers

The third party that I go through is a print on demand sorta deal- you give them a design and they slap it on a good gaggle of things, like clothes, pins, pillowcases, whatever else. As of right now, I've only bought the stickers through them. I like the quality of their print and as far as the stickers go I like the durability of the materials they use. However, what I don't like was the increased amount of spam calls I got a few days after I purchased those stickers. Nature of the beast now, I'm sure, but 19 calls in one afternoon got a little old really fast lmao

That being said, I'm gonna tough it out and see if I can't get the ball rolling on some desk/card game mats, more stickers, and possibly even those waifu pillowcases

Unfortunately, that's all I really have for you dudes. It's a slow process, I know, and it kinda sucks that it's taking as long as it is. The goal as of right now is to save as much as I can, get an inventory established, and start selling shit. I'll be mulling over a deadline for myself in the coming weeks to really light a fire under my ass

As it stands, currently, I'd say I'm 16% ready to have any sort of store front established and open for bidness

As always, I can't thank you enough for your continued support. If you like the work I do and wish to support me further, tell your friends about me and share my work with them. It truly means the world to me and I fear I'll never have the vocabulary to express how thankful I am for you and your continued support

Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, thank you kindly

I wanted to say thank you so much for your support and I hope you've been enjoying the content so far! I also wanted to give a little update for the coming year and talk a little bit about the future of what it is I wanna do with this art hustle

But first... Hot damn, 5 subscribers.
You cats deserve all the booty in the world for helping me steel my resolve to draw my silly little girlies. There was a point where I had only one subscriber a few years back when I didn't take this paywall site stuff as seriously and I had convinced myself that 1 subscriber was all I was ever gonna get, but now there's 5 of you magnificent bastards who want me to keep doing the work that I do and it makes a homie misty eyed lol

I will never be able to thank you enough with words, so I hope my pinup girls will suffice as thanks🙏 It means the world to me. Thank you again😭

Getting back on track:

I have a bad habit of starting a project and never finishing it because I'll do a warm up sketch, get enthralled with that sketch, render it out, and repeat that cycle of "warm up sketching-to-finalizing" and I just never get back around to that first project that started the cycle

I have about 9 unfinished projects that I didn't get done this year because I was too busy rendering out warm up sketches that I was locked into. It's my goal to have those 9 projects done by this time next year. More than enough time to get them done, I think, and it's my hope that you like how they turn out. Since they're technically "new" art, I'll make them available for you to see under the $5 tier

Speaking of tiers...

I was chatting up a friend of mine this Summer about possibly adding a new tier. It wouldn't be anything too fancy and would essentially be the same as the $5 "Art Aficionado" tier, only this one would have the benefit of sending out a request character for me to potentially draw up

How it would work would be for a few extra bucks, you request a character (or I throw up a poll of characters for you to choose from if I don't have a list of requests) and at the end of the month you'd essentially have a heavily discounted single character commission if your character was chosen. Basically a gacha.

I'd like to add more to this potential tier so you get the most bang for your buck, but I'm not entirely too sure how to make that happen without tiring my punk ass out lol

I'll keep this potential new tier idea on the back burner for now, but it is something that I will consider if there's a large enough demand for it c:

If you recall from my last update post from this past October, I talked a little bit about the batch of stickers I bought through a third party and how I've been doing "field tests" with them. While I'm not privy to what kind of equipment that this third party uses to print their stickers, these field tests seem to me like a wasted effort because at any moment they can change their operation or use different materials and completely make any data I've gathered be outdated and wrong. As it stands currently, I'll be sticking with this third party until I've gathered enough resources myself to make my own stickers here in-house

With that in mind, here are the results of the sun test

I had the sticker facing West for these last 3 months, so half of the time the sticker was in the sun on the days were there was a sun. I feel that the stickers hold up well enough on their own, but if exposed to something like the sun and heat for a prolonged period of time, there will be a noticeable decline in the sticker quality (No duh.)

That being said, I feel that the picture quality of the sticker held up nice enough after 3 months in the sun, so I'll most likely be making and ordering more stickers from the same third party.

When I started the "sun test" back in September, it was my hope that the stickers would last for 6 months. We're halfway there and I will be doing a follow up in March to see how bad the sun cooked our lovely lady lol

Some of the new art posted in the $5 tier will be tweaked and edited later for possible prints and other physical goodies like stickers, acrylic keychains, desk/card mats, possibly clothes, as well as digital stuffs like wallpapers. Should be fun and we'll play it by ear to see where this all goes lol

Last year, or maybe even the year before, I can't quite remember, I ordered a handful of these business cards to throw in with any prints I might've sold, but I'm thinking I may've jumped the gun on that, and truthfully I feel that enough time has passed that I look at the design of these cards and think that it's time for an upgrade

One thing you may have noticed with all of these posts -and even in the pictures above- is that there is a weird sort of filter on the image files; the subtle (or maybe not so subtle idk) shapes, curves, and swirls on the image. I've been using an anti AI program called Glaze and the idea behind it -as I understand it- is that it adds a layer of protection on my doodles to keep folks from running my work through a machine learning program to steal it and pawn it off as their own.

For a while, I've been "glazing" my work to deter people from lifting my work, but one thing I didn't like about it was how obvious it looked that something was off about the finished project. Everything looked "filmy" and oil slick-y, and I had to find a sweet spot within the Glaze app itself to make something protected while also not sacrificing too much of the image quality itself. After much consideration, trial and error, and determination (hehe), I had found that sweet spot and that sweet spot would be a main stay with my process.

Here are some of the more scuffed looking Glaze jobs on that same piece:

Anyway, I was happy with the outcome as I didn't see anyone taking my work and flipping it to make a quick buck, most likely because I am a "literal who" and my largest social media account is Instagram at around 150 followers lol

Recently Twitter/X came out with an update that allows you to edit any image that anyone posts (it doesn't have to be your post) and turn it into AI slop. Now, this on it's own isn't the same process as taking someone's work, and running it through some GenAI software to completely ape their work and pass it off as your own, it's still being fine tuned and there are some work arounds on Twitter/X that you as the OP can do to prevent people from editing your image posts (like posting images as videos/gifs) but it's only a matter of time before that gets patched and people can edit videos and gifs, and I'd go as far as to wager that it's only a matter of time before other social media sites like BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, and so on adopt the "Edit Image" model to allow for people on their platforms to run images through some internal AI software and make the pollution of their sites more accessible

Admittedly, I tried this with one of my own finished doodles to see if Glaze would protect it from being "slopified". It unfortunately did not. What's more is there were parts of that drawing's slopification that looked like I drew it and I can't really express how disappointed and crushed I felt at the idea that Glazing my work and sacrificing the picture quality -even just a little bit- was all for naught

For the time being, I think I'll keep Glazing my doodles, just to be consistent, but there's a part of me that is playing around with the idea to not glaze anything at all because there's ultimately no point to it when the end result is wear and tear on my hardware and images that can still be stolen and used to train some AI bullshit lol

We're in a sort of "arms race" with AI stuff and this Twitter/X update was a big enough blow to make me reconsider a few things in regards to my process lol

As of right now, I have exactly 1 big project planned that I am currently working on. It's nothing all that special and admittedly it's a little beyond my depth as a doodler. When I have more to say about it and when I have more to show off, I'll post about it here, but it's my hope that you guys and gals will enjoy it

In closing, I'd like to say thanks again for the support- I seriously cannot express how elated I am at the support I've recieved, and it's all thanks to you dudes. I hope you and yours have a peaceful New Year and an easy 2026. Cheers🍻