how november went
2021 dec 02 21:32
I have been running around all week wrapping up orders from the sale and packing up rewards that I haven't had the mental and physical energy to write this update blog. To be completely honest, I'm probably not in the best headspace to write this as a lot of realizations about running this shop and selling art in general. I can't say it gets any easier the longer I do this. Just when I think I have the hang of it, something always seems to flip everything I know upside down.
Let's take this pandemic. We are now entering year 3. I never thought I would be writing that but here we are. The Black Plague lasted what... 7 years? Anyway, the pandemic completely oversaturated the online market. Many of those who were able to safely quarantine at home decided to start their own home business. People who were already selling things pushed their online shop more. It's definitely changed the way we know online shopping. New taxes were introduced to make it harder to sell to other countries. Everyone was expecting shipping to be free and one-day, just like Amazon. Every small biz account I've followed would constantly push all the commercial holiday sales that big box stores followed. I dunno. I already kinda hated this art hustle, but with in the last couple of years it's turned into a full-on culture and I hate it even more.
Having a 50% off sale (which is the first time I've had a store-wide discount that high) shed light on a lot of things, but also raised a lot more questions. Without getting into too much detail, I'm thinking of running another short sale with a high discount before the end of the year to clear out even more things, then shut the shop down in January to give me some time to think about what the fuck I'm doing with all this.
Anyway... for November updates, at least for the second half:
With all my commissions out of the way, I was able to focus on the second half of the 2022 calendar. It was hard to get back into it since It had been a good couple of weeks drawing in another style completely that the early parts of the Wolpertinger piece looked really off. After messing with it a bit, I finally got into the flow of it and managed to knock out the rest of the set fairly quickly.
This whole series was really fun to do and I'm really tempted to play around with this style using the animation feature in Fresco (which they finally launched!). I know it's gonna take a lot of time and I'm scared it will eat into the rest of my creation time when it comes to making sub rewards. Which is another thing.
There is an ongoing paper shortage happening. After finally deciding it was more economical to get my postcards printed at my local print shop, all this happened. Now I have to decide whether I start printing cards at home or totally just remove that option from rewards. And if I end up printing all rewards myself again, I will have to greatly restructure my tiers (or at least the rewards going to each one) since getting supplies is harder and getting more expensive. It's looking grim. I'm taking the month of December to figure this out. I don't know how much art I'll be able to tackle due to the holidays so I may have to consider pausing collecting money in the event I can't come up with anything.
I dunno. If it's not one thing, it's another. Whatever. I'll figure it out like I always do I guess. I'm just tired of wasting time coming up with solutions to a problem I thought I had already solved, but I guess that's life, huh.
So with that, I hope everyone can get a couple of relaxing days in this month and that your holidays and New Year are decent.