Whoops! I overdid it again..

Been a while since I’ve written and posted a journal on DA. I have been seriously slacking!

So it’s about time for an update!

SUBSCRIPTION PAGE

In December last year I decided to test out the very new deviantArt Subscription system. I’d been toying with the idea of creating a Patreon Page to upload reference, advice and tutorial (and other art) pages, but decided to stick with deviantart and give them a try, especially as it’s a forum that’s allowed me to develop a good following and meet like-minded fans and artists over the years. Plus, I thought willing subscribers would rather keep it all on one platform rather than transfer over to another?

THE REASON.

This may be a bit of an assumption but I would say that a lot of people have a ‘side hustle’ to ‘compliment’ their job.😄 Art and illustration has always been mine. For a long time I was happy sharing my art freely, especially the figure and physique references from my sketchbook. Over time though I found that all of this was being downloaded and shared without my permission on various websites. My favourite one of these was getting an email from Pinterest recommending that I might be interested in my own artwork! 😄 I’ve even found total strangers trying to sell pieces of my artwork on NFT sites, which most definitely sucks, especially when trying to get them taken down, as there’s a huge rigmarole involved in trying to prove that YOUR art is the original! Even though it has both my own AND a deviantArt watermark! 😂

OVERWHELM

So, being an artist is actually a lot tougher than it sounds when you have a family and a full time job. In an effort to be successful you want to take on every job offered and please everyone but fitting it in is not as easy as you’d believe! Over the last 2 years I took on WAY more than I could cope with and absolutely blew my tiny little mind, leading to massive moments of feeling overwhelmed. 🤯 Anyone who’s experienced this will know, that when it all gets too much, you end up not wanting to do ANYTHING! You sit there and think, “why am I doing all this stuff for other people? I wanna do what I want for a change!” (Note: This is compounded when you get home from a full day of work!😂) As a result I was way behind on a lot of deadlines and was always playing catch up with my Subscription Page. This was all my own fault too, having unrealistic ideas of time and trying to fit too much in to an already typically busy day. However, I’m happy to say that I now have my commission list at a manageable stage and DON’T intend to take on any more until I’m a lot more organised with my page.

THANK YOU.

A HUGE thank you to my subscribers - from the bottom of my heart I’m very grateful to you for taking a chance on me. Even to the guys who’ve UNsubscribed! I’m still massively grateful that you were willing to give me a shot. The fault lies at my door for any reason that people unsubscribe, be it inconsistent posting or not enough content in general. But to those who are still with me, my thanks is profound and I intend to keep putting up content and on a more regular basis. I hope you enjoy it and please feed back any suggestions you might have. 👍🏻

REGULAR DA

I know some of my long term watchers might be a bit upset that I’m not submitting so much that’s available to them anymore and I can fully appreciate that. But the Subs Page seemed a better way to get back a little more control over where my art turns up. Now that I’ve got a little more control over my schedule, I intend to post more, both on regular and Subs DA. However, the figure reference/tutorial stuff will be solely intended for the Subs. I think when I last counted there was about 90 deviations that I’ve put on the standard page so there’s still a good amount there for folks to check out.

Thanks for reading. I know I kinda rambled on there. 😄

Much love

Bambs