Return of the Rising Revenge: The Come Back Strikes Back 2: Secret of the Ooze

Hey, everybody! Long time no post! So I've been meaning to write this since about the last week of December, but... *trails off, begins to stare blankly while war sound effects play in the distance* W-wha... Where was I? Oh, yeah. The first couple weeks of 2021 have felt more like the 13th month of 2020, complete with the lousy Smarch weather, but nevertheless, I've decided to officially make my return to Patreon! I am going to be doing things a little bit different, though.

First, I think I'm going to try to take a little more of an informal approach. Before, what I considered to be the main feature of my Patrion was the monthly sketches, but frankly, they were becoming a bit of a chore and ultimately I think had a negative influence on my output. It never failed; once I *had* to draw something, I would *want* to draw something else, leading me to put off working on the "have to" but still not doing the "want to" out of guilt. So going forward, I might ask for ideas or suggestions from time to time, but ultimately I'm just going to draw what I want to draw. I might still do occasional polls because I simply enjoy doing them, but they'll be more along the lines of, say, "I'm streaming on Twitch tonight and I've narrowed it down to these 3 characters. Who should I draw?"

And that leads to my second point: I'm going to try to take a more holistic approach to my entire online presence. I have all these different platforms - Patreon, Twitch, comics - and I tried to handle them all individually, making separate content for each while rarely if ever crossing over. Of course that's going to be overwhelming for one person. So going forward, there's going to be a lot more blending of the three. It's already started on my Twitch channel where I've been mostly working on comic pages for the last few weeks, and I have some plans for other comic projects in the future that you'll see first here on Patreon.

Finally, I think I'm going to broaden the scope of things I'll be posting here. Until now, it's been all about my comic-adjacent art, but while that will most likely continue to be my main focus, I have a number of other creative interests that I would like to share as well. If you're friends with me on Facebook, you'll probably have seen by now that I'm starting to get into wet on wet oil painting, so expect to see some mighty mountains, happy little trees, and goddamn clouds that can frankly kiss my ass. (Yeah, I'm struggling with clouds.) I also like to build stuff. I built an entire arcade machine last year and my biggest regret is that I didn't document it more than I did, so expect to see projects like that as well. And who knows? I may even try to get back into a little creative writing eventually. An old friend from high school contacted me the other day and they reminded me of how important that used to be for me way back then and it sort of started some gears turning in my head. We'll see.

Anyway, that's it for now. I hope you're all cool with the new direction I'm taking. If you do decide that this isn't quite what you signed up for, or most definitely if these rough times have left you in a tough financial spot, know that you'll get no judgement from me if you decide you can't support me any more. Otherwise, thank you all so much for sticking with me. I look forward to getting back into the swing of things!