Who are you?

I go by VicekillX, or Vice for short. I am an independent artist specializing in horror, macabre, erotica, and combinations thereof. If you've ever wanted to fuck a monster, alien, or robot, I'm your guy. Big teeth, big claws, and big dicks. Chef kiss.

Outside of art, I'm a hardcore zoology nerd, especially herpetology, arachnology, and ichthyology, in that order. I went to school for marine bio (no degree, unfortunately) and own a menagerie of reptiles and tarantulas. I love superheroes, horror lets plays, hunting games, and any and all things pasta.

I'm not shy about what I do or what I'm into and I encourage other people not to be as well. The world is shit enough without judging each other for what makes us happy. I much rather enjoy what I enjoy with people who enjoy the same thing. I spent too long trying to conform to what an Artist TM is supposed to be instead of being what a Vice is supposed to be. I want to be informal, unashamed, and unhindered, so I am. In my house, there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure.

Kill your vices. They were never vices to begin with.

Why SubscribeStar?

SubscribeStar is the best way for my fans (that's you guys) to help me do what I want to do and to have a more hands-on role. It's a way for people to support me if they can't afford commissions or merch, want to have a finger on the pulse of my projects, or just want to give a little extra. And it's a way for me to give back to you for showing that support and helping me get to where I am and where I'm going. It lets you see more than the public face, and be part of my creative process from start to finish. It makes you part of my art.

At this time my primary source of income is from commissions. And while I enjoy this part of my job immensely, it does mean my personal projects can be forced to the sidelines, and my portfolio is kinda at the mercy of my clients. By supporting me on SubscribeStar, you are directly helping me shift some of the focus to my personal projects. SubscribeStar can alleviate the pressure of a long commission queue, which gives me more freedom to go balls deep in the art, characters, and stories I'm passionate about. And without the prying eye of certain other judgmental subscription platforms looming over my shoulder to keep me in line.

How does it work?

You choose which tier you'd like to join. As soon as you join, you will have access to the three most recent posts on my page for the first 30 days. Once those 30 days are up, you’ll gain access to the entire archive and all future posts as long as you are pledged. This process is merely to prevent people from subscribing, collecting a bunch of exclusive content, cancelling their subscription right away, and posting said exclusive content publicly. You can view, like, and comment on all new posts, as well as all of the previous ones. You will be automatically charged every 30 days from the day you subscribe to get continued access until you upgrade, downgrade, or cancel.

To join the discord server and gain your exclusive role, click the Discord Chat button in the top left corner of my page once you’ve subscribed.

What gets posted here?

As of right now, all pledge tiers get the same rewards. I want you to sub because you love what I do and want to see more, not to sell you things.

I’ve made the mistake of overpromising rewards that I couldn’t keep up with in the past, and it's even harder to stay on top of when I dunno what the fuck I'm doing with my art in general. So for now, this account is primarily a tip jar. The only reward I can commit to with any consistency is high res art packs every month. I might throw some other things on here occasionally, but until I get that shit figured out, you're basically just donating because you like my art and you want me to keep doing it. And I love you for that <3

2025 State of the Vice Address

I’ve made a lot of posts over the years about experiencing burnout. This is more like realizing I’ve been stuck in a glue trap for a decade.

This is going to be a very long post, and probably a little rambly. I could try to give a TLDR, but I honestly think it’s kind of important to understand exactly what we (myself and many other artists) are going through right now.

Recently I was going through art files to compile from the last couple years (I’ll get into that later) and I honestly just found it…surprisingly depressing. Not because I don’t like the art - some of my favorite things I’ve ever done were from those years - but because of the trends I noticed. I make, or at least finish enough to post, a little less art every year. Early on I attributed that to prioritizing quality over quantity, higher technical skill replacing shortcuts, and no longer being a teen/20-something with lots of energy and no responsibilities. But since 2020…that no longer feels like the case. I’m not doing full color paintings or fully rendered traditional graphite pieces. I’ve improved in some ways, it’s kind of impossible not to, but I don’t feel like I improved as much as I would expect over 5 years; certainly nowhere near the improvement I saw between 2015 and 2020. I definitely don’t have the energy to be streaming for 5 hours 5 days a week and crank out 2-3 commissions a month anymore like I did 10 years ago. And of the art I do have, the overwhelming majority is stream sketches with very short lifespans and no long-term payoff.

Some of this, I’m sure it goes without saying, is due to the state of the world. Our government is more hostile to our wellbeing now than it ever has been in my lifetime (which I recognize is itself a privilege other countries and even other minorities within the US are not granted). People around the world are dying in power-hungry invasions, abusive and exploitative industries, hate crimes, and a direct and intentional dismantling of the basic concept of human empathy. The environment is collapsing around us and species are going extinct at an alarming rate. Everything is increasingly expensive and the rich keep getting richer with seemingly no consequences. And this barrage is completely inescapable anywhere on the internet, no matter what kind of add-ons or blacklisting features you use.

Artists (porn and kink/fetish artists especially) have gotten an extra layer (or three) of Fuck You in just the past few years: Tumblr shunted out the people who built their platform in 2018; NFTs stole our work directly, spammed our inboxes, and scammed consumers from 2020-2023; AI has stolen our work indirectly, stolen our jobs directly, poisoned our reference and education wells, infected every single feed/FYP/etc on every single platform that permits their existence, and irreparably damaged the internet as a whole to such a sickening extent that “spamming” doesn’t even come close to a strong enough word, all since 2022. And now in 2025, we’re being ousted from platform after platform, pushed further into the shadows than we already were, banned from events and payment processors and any other ways we could earn a living from our work, and outright criminalized in multiple states. That is fucking batshit. For the first time in my life I am forced to grapple with the idea that not only will I possibly not have a job in a couple years, but my job might become illegal. The career I’ve spent literally half my life building is at the mercy of people who don’t even think I deserve to exist.

I’m not just worried about losing metaphorical progress on my career save file. I know we’ll all collectively figure it out and share resources between each other if and when the time comes. It’s just been constant blow after blow after blow for years with very little positive developments to break it up. It’s worn down our resolve and our defenses. For a lot of us art isn’t even fun anymore. Or at the very least, being an artist online isn’t fun anymore. Porn artists of course existed before social media and before the internet itself, but I haven’t been an offline artist since I was 13. I have zero idea what that career path looks like, and that is terrifying and draining.

In 2023 I was (finally) diagnosed with autism and ADHD. I’m really glad I did, cuz it has put so much hardship in my life into perspective. Unfortunately, it also really complicates my relationship with art, both as a job and in general. I’m pretty sure most of the people reading this are also neurodivergent and probably don’t need an explanation, but just in case. The short version is that I frequently struggle with things like time awareness, switching between tasks or “modes”, and managing sensory and mental input. Sometimes I am functionally incapable of doing anything but work for hours at a time with no breaks, and sometimes I am functionally incapable of working on things that provide the least bit of resistance. I can sit at my desk with my art program and canvas open and my work music playing and no distractions and still just…not be able to do anything with it. It’s like if you had a 1 in 3 chance of feeling the same dread and psyching yourself up every time you make lunch as you’d feel if you had to amputate your own finger. It’s extremely inconsistent and unpredictable, as is the effectiveness of any of the possible solutions. Energy is difficult to allocate; taking a 5 minute drive to Walmart first thing in the morning can put me out of commission for the entire day, or I can go to a day-long event and be alert and chipper the entire time I’m there, but then I need 3 days to properly recover. And all of this gets even more difficult when I feel stressed or overwhelmed, and autistic people often have a stronger emotional response to unfairness and injustice. Do you see where this is going?

But I’m not making this post because Life is Hard And The World is Terrible. We all know that already. I’m making this post because I personally am approaching a breaking point that I’m not sure I can bounce back from.

Even disregarding the abuse our willpower has been subjected to for over half a decade, I still feel like it only accelerated the inevitable for me. My job is now a constant grind with very little room for play, which is both a catalyst to and a product of a never-ending stop-start workflow. To be clear, I have always been an artist who is keenly aware that my job is in fact a job, and have treated it as such. I take the business side of my career very seriously. I have regular “office” hours, two scheduled days off per week, weekly-updated spreadsheets that record every single incoming and outgoing transaction and indicate which ones are tax deductible, commission forms that autofill responses into spreadsheets so I always have payment records and contact info on hand, etc. The hazards I keep running into are not a matter of self-discipline or poor organization. It’s more like hitting the end of my leash before I can gain any momentum. Maybe a family emergency happens, or a world event kneecaps my willpower for a couple days, or I overwork myself so hard due to financial stress that I injure myself again. I try to be compassionate to myself and take the time I need to recover, but I have bills to pay. And every time I think I’m finally back in the swing of things and can start working consistently again, I get hit with another one.

The way I work right now is not healthy and not sustainable. On paper, I work from 11 am to 5 or 6 pm Tuesday to Friday, plus Saturday streams that are usually 11-4 but occasionally stop or start a little late or early. That’s a pretty reasonable schedule…for a neurotypical person. I take longer to recharge my battery than a neurotypical person. I fail to take breaks because of time blindness and trouble switching tasks. I drain my reserves spending half my time on art for other people until I struggle to spend even one seventh of my time on art for myself. Then I psych myself up to push through one more day for a stream, and then I’m so tired on Sunday and Monday that I have a hard time getting basic chores done. Then when the next week rolls around, I still haven’t recovered, so I get a little less done each day than I did the week before. Then the next week I work a little overtime to try and catch up because I have to cover bills at the end of the month and I want to get the queue moving, and flip a coin on whether the RSI is gonna stop me this week or if i can squeak a couple more in before it does (this has happened 3 times this year and I’m unable to work for a minimum one week each time). Rinse and repeat. Sprinkle life events to taste.

A “regular” job is off the table until I have no other choice. I’ve had a couple here and there over the years, but the longest one only lasted 9 months before I had enough. Getting up early, leaving the house, and being around people all day multiple days a week is not sustainable for me either. I can’t handle the stress of not knowing my hours or days off until a week or two in advance, which is apparently the norm for entry-level jobs now. I don’t have the formal education for the other jobs I would want (I’ve applied anyway and been rejected or ignored). I’m sure I could ask for accommodations with the ‘tism, but I also know there’s always a big enough chance that they’ll never be enforced or taken seriously. If I end up in the mainstream workforce again, either I found the perfect holy grail job, or I am in strict, black and white survival mode.

I have no room for personal art. Not in my schedule, not in my wallet, not in my heart. And that is soul-crushing. I want to make personal art again, but I swear it’s almost like I’ve forgotten how. I have yet to unlearn the deep-seated idea that I should only talk about my OCs and whatnot if directly asked because otherwise people will get annoyed (because others have gotten annoyed when I special interest dumped in the past, and honestly sometimes it annoys me when others do it too). I think it’s a combination of factors, but mostly a lack of connection with my audience. It makes enough sense that original work is harder to get people invested in because I don’t have the pre-laid groundwork of a built-in fandom or the inherent connection someone will have with a commission of their own character. Also doesn’t help that some of my favorite and most personal OCs are fandom OCs that I ship with canon characters, which is apparently still Cringe ™ or whatever. I don’t know how to get people interested when I don’t have a consumable story for them, and can’t find the willpower to even doodle them most days. And sometimes it’s hard to get through a piece believing that most people aren’t going to be as enthusiastic about it as they would be for something else, no matter how many hours of hard work I pour into it. Most of my personal art stays a sketch because of that.

I tried for a while to dedicate Fridays to personal art, but it seems like every week either something else gets in the way, or I’m not feeling well physically or emotionally, or I’m just too fucking exhausted from the entire week leading up to that to actually do it. So I just end up spending my personal art days feeling tired, cranky, guilty for not sticking to my plan, and frustrated that all my commissions will sit on my queue for another 4 days for nothing, not even with different cool art to show for it. I could just do it another day instead, but then I have to either sacrifice a day on commissions and delay that even further, or I do it after hours and risk another injury. That said I’m currently testing out swapping it with my Tuesday admin work block, so hopefully that will help curb it.

I’m gonna be as transparent about the financial situation as I can reasonably be. I make about $1000-2000 a month, depending on how many stream sketches I’m able to do within that month. I am extremely fortunate to have an indescribably generous and patient living situation, and my monthly bills (rent, car, phone, etc) only totaled about $850 (though will drop to ~$500 now that my car is paid off, until I can get the title and register it under my own name and get car insurance, so I’m expecting ~$650). I also pay for most of the supplies for our ~30 animals, including some special needs and long-term medication, so that’s an additional roughly $250/mo. The monthly subscriptions that I use for business, not including other monthly business expenses, are another $115/mo. All of that, before factoring in anything else (food, gas, office supplies, art supplies, shipping and manufacturing expenses, Etsy fees, car maintenance, annual subscriptions, car maintenance, etc), is already $1015/mo assuming my car insurance estimate is close. It’s actually pretty manageable on a good month where I’m lucky enough to both fill slots and be physically capable of completing them on time, but those months are increasingly fewer and farther between. I have a little more than another $1000 to pay off on credit cards, and at the moment I am trying to save up for 3 new large snake enclosures (~$1500 total), a new computer/updated parts ($1500-1800), and new headphones (~$300). I’ve thought about doing a drive like I did for Aether’s enclosure upgrade last time, but I don’t know if it’s smart or fair to do that when I can’t even make progress on the work I have in front of me.

The grind is driving me to a grinding halt. I haven’t opened my main queue in years because my waitlist is years-long itself and builds up faster than I can work through it. I did the actual math and over 81% of my income is solely from stream sketches. I leaned into stream sketches because they’re far more consistent income than the main queue, and they offer a chance for people who maybe can’t afford to be on the main queue to get art from me. It’s just a little disheartening to see it overshadow my entire body of work when it was only ever supposed to be a sort of side-hustle to keep a steady baseline while navigating the hills and valleys of the main queue. But now they’re all I have to show, and sometimes even prevent me from getting to anything else at all. Honestly I wish I could flip my schedule, where I could do personal art 4 days a week and keep commissions to 1 or 2. I don’t want to stop commissions entirely, I do like doing them under the right circumstances, but relying on them as my only source of income is objectively bad for my wellbeing. I’ve known that for years, but I’ve never been able to get to a stable enough point to pivot and invest in another method without sacrificing my stability.

And yet I find myself at a crossroads. What I’m doing now is not healthy, sustainable, or fulfilling. It’s not working. Something’s got to change or I’m gonna completely lose my ability to make art at all.

So, here’s some ideas I’ve been sitting on:

Raising prices. Pretty straightforward. If I can make a little more off the same amount of work, I won’t have to cram so much work in and both my brain and body will thank me. The problem is I know we’re all tightening our belts a little right now, and I don’t want to outprice my audience. It’ll probably take some iterating to figure out what the right price point is for each commission type.
Retooling my sponsorship commission type and pushing it harder. Right now I think it’s a little too open-ended and a little too expensive for the people who would be interested in it. I want to instead make it a monthly or bimonthly poll, and to make it so as many people can participate as possible (because making it a communal event thing will get more people excited about it, and that gets me excited about it). What I still have to figure out is how to collect money for it - pay to vote, only winning voters pay, just making it subscriber exclusive, etc - without alienating anybody. I do have some ideas though, and I’ll probably test drive one or two in my Discord server before I adopt them officially.
Passive income, so I don’t have to rely so much on commissions in the first place, or at all:
- Merch and online stores. I’ve had an online shop for years, but haven’t made a noteworthy amount of money from it since 2016/17 when I made like $1500+ just off Overwatch dakis. This year is probably the most successful year I’ve had since then, currently sitting at $517 after listing fees (not including transaction fees, shipping fees, shipping materials…and $217 of that was from a single order lol). I have a lot of ideas for merch designs (seriously, like…pages) but I have a hard time committing to them because of the risk. I’ve tried asking my subscribers, my discord members, my general platform audiences, friends and family, and everybody else I can think of for feedback on what products and designs would interest them, but I seem to have trouble getting helpful responses in general. And if I do actually see some interest, it quite often doesn’t follow through once the item is actually for sale. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if the overhead for creating a physical item at all wasn’t prohibitively expensive; it’s one thing to crank out a sticker for ~$30-60, and another to shell out $300-500 for some playmats without any inkling whatsoever of how well they’ll sell or how long they’ll be taking up storage space in my office. But, for now at least, I can just focus on making the damn art and figure out logistics later.
- SubscribeStar. This has also been up for years, and to be fair does well enough to pay for Christmas shopping every year. I’ve tried revitalizing it multiple times, but I think it comes back to the same (and in this case cyclical) issue of missing connection. I have (relatively) few subscribers, so putting time and effort into content feels unrewarding because I’m unlikely to get much of a response, if any. But then the lack of content isn’t very enticing for new subscribers, so I never get more. I need to just sit down and find some low-bandwidth, low-expense rewards I can offer and actually stick to it without burning myself out again.
- Art packs. Digital packs of high res art files. My roommate suggested this one, and it’s actually the reason I was going through files from the last few years. I’ve thought of it in the past but never end up prioritizing it because it’s not something I personally have any interest in buying. But clearly other people do, because it’s one of the most popular Patreon/Substar rewards and said roommate has made money from selling them directly. Especially with all the porn/kink crackdowns, this might become more common soon. I was able to gather enough material to compile a couple, but it kinda sucked to realize I had very few nice finished pieces to include in them. The major roadblock here is either finding a platform to sell them that both permits the content I’d be selling and has substantial enough traffic to be worth it, or figuring out a way to accept payments and deliver files directly myself.
Events. I miss conventions. The last one I did was March of 2020, literally about a week before COVID escalated and everything went into lockdown. By the time cons were happening regularly, I had already moved across the country and left most of my convention supplies behind. My regular circuit was too far to be financially viable, I’m completely unfamiliar with all the west coast cons, and I haven’t had the expendable income to rebuild my setup and book hotel rooms. But I miss it so much. I also had a goal around 2018-2019 to diversify into events other than furry conventions, and I think it’s still a goal now. I’d love to try tattoo conventions, horror conventions, sex and kink conventions, Pride events, maybe even take the side business to some reptile shows. This will probably have to be on the backburner for now, but I want to keep it in mind when figuring out the other stuff.

So, that’s where I’m at. I dunno what I’m hoping to get out of posting this, other than to give you all an update as to what’s been going on, and why my queue, posting schedule, and online presence in general have been so slow. I hope it doesn’t come across like I’m fishing for sympathy or asking for handouts. It sucks to be here, and it sucks to have to air it out, but I really value transparency and open communication and think the online art world could really benefit from more of it right now.

As always, questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome and appreciated. Hopefully next time I have an update to share, it’ll be about what a great idea this all was lol

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2025 State of the Vice Address

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