A Change for those Seeking Critiques

Don't worry, Drawabox isn't closing, and I'm still doing critiques. But for the sake of my sanity as well as my growth as an artist, some aspects of how the patreon tiers are organized are changing. You can skip my explanation if you like, the changes themselves listed in bold a little ways down.

My time working on Drawabox and /r/ArtFundamentals has been something pretty special. It's been a ton of work, but being able to help so many people find their footing with an otherwise guarded and mystifying skill has really added a great deal of value to my life. I started in August 2014, just posting informal hand-written lessons and offering advice to those who completed the suggested work - from there it grew like a snowball tumbling down a hill, and became an avalanche.

In October 2016, after two years of doing critiques for free, I hit my limit and had to put up a fairly meagre pay wall to limit the amount of work I was taking on. At the same time, I took the subreddit which had largely been a conversation with me alone and turned it into a proper, thriving community of artists - beginners and established alike - to help each other using my resources, and under my supervision.

I've come to a similar point. The workload as it stands (at least on its own) is manageable, but I simply can't continue to devote all of my time to it anymore. Alongside my full time job (which itself has crunch periods which at their worst saw me at work for 26 consecutive days, from 10-16 hours per day, over the summer), I try my best to balance other personal projects - one-off illustrations, game development, and most recently a new web comic. These personal projects are what I live for, and in order to accomplish anything meaningful with them, I need to reorganize the amount of time I spend on the most time consuming part of Drawabox.

Furthermore, I find the impact I have by adding new lesson content (like the 20+ new videos I added between Christmas and New Years), new challenges and other far reaching material is of far greater importance than the individual critiques. I'd like to make more where it is needed, and I'm particularly keen on creating an entirely new lesson set focusing on design - not graphic design, but the kind that I do at my full time job. The design of objects, characters, environments, etc. with a focus on the use of form language and proportion.

Lastly, some lessons simply take a lot more time and effort to critique than others. Where lessons 1 and 2 maybe take 10 minutes each on average, lessons 3-7 can take me an average of 30 minutes each - with some going as far as a full hour or more. Lump in the more recent increase in students who cancel before fulfilling pledges despite receiving critiques (remember that due to Patreon's weirdness, I've always allowed students to receive critiques before actually paying, meaning you receive the services first and pay at the beginning of the following month), and those who submit homework far more frequently than one would consider to be fair (due to the overhead in tracking who's submitted how many times, I allow students to determine for themselves how many submissions in a given month is fair).

Of course, I always try and lean my pricing towards being accessible - the resulting hourly rate is always significantly lower than what I'd charge for freelance illustration, because my goal is still to help those who may not be able to pay for classes that run several hundred dollars, but are still interested in determining if drawing is something they'd like to pursue.

Anyway, here are the changes, starting today (March 1st 2018):

$3+ Pledges will receive critiques for lessons 1 and 2, as well as the box and cylinder challenges. These lessons are the most impactful of the set and build up a solid base. They're also usually the least time consuming for me to critique.

$7+ Pledges will receive critiques for lessons 3 and 4, as well as the texture challenge. I wasn't initially going to create an intermediary tier (as these lessons take as long to critique as those in the next tier), but upon discussion with my patrons on discord, I decided that would be the best road to take.

$10+ Pledges will receive critiques for lessons 5-7, as well as the treasure chest challenge.

I leave how many times you submit work within a given month up to you, as not all submissions are the same. Sometimes they're simply extremely well done, and take me very little time to critique. Sometimes there's a lot to discuss, and require me to draw demos or write notes directly on your work. Other times submissions are a resubmission of work I asked you to redo, and if they're done correctly, won't take me much time at all.

At the end of the day, I am changing things with the goal of reducing my workload. While this is does mean I fully expect many of you will cancel your pledges because this barrier has been raised above your means, that's the downside to me not having enough hours in the day.

For those of you who do end up having to cancel, remember that drawabox is a large community. It's not just the subreddit - the discord server is quite active and has a lot of people who are more than happy to help you identify where you need to improve on your work. My goal as far as adding new video content (especially in lessons 1 and 2) is so students can reference them directly when critiquing their peers.

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience these changes may cause. One day, I will perfect my self-cloning technology and will be able to make a small army of instructors. For now though, they last only a couple days and tend to descend into a state of perpetual screeching.