2025 Plans, Patreon Closure, Comm Rates (please read!)

Hello! If you wanting just the straight news, it's at the bottom of this post.

First off, I would like to give a big thanks to anyone and everyone who has ever supported me financially for my art. I truly do appreciate each and every person who has ever done so for the decades I've been doing art. I took my first commission at age 13, and I'm now 30. Time flies!

I have been thinking about what I would like to do moving forward with my art, and how it affects my personal life. I do still like doing digital art, but I've grown more interested in physical art in the past few years, namely garage kits and fiber arts. During the pandemic, when I was unemployed, I took up these hobbies as a way to 'unplug' from digital art commissions. At that point, what was once my main hobby was then my only source of income, outside of unemployment checks. It stopped being as enjoyable, sadly.

Now that I've had a full time position for a few years, my time has become limited. Again, this is not me wanting to quit digital art entirely. Far from it! But, I think shutting down my patreon and upping my commission prices in order to cut demand will help me gain extra time back. Not just for my hobbies, but to avoid burnout and disdain for digital art. I want to also feel less guilty overall if I spend my weekend working on other projects, rather than a commission.

My commission prices have remained the same for years at this point. It is time to raise them in order to better reflect my current level of skill, as well as time involved. I'm not even paying myself minimum wage anymore, far below it, in fact. While I believe that art should be accessible to the public, I can no longer be selling my time for less than $10 an hour. I've had the opinion for a very long time that I wasn't 'worth it', and I've realized this comes from a place of self-loathing, more than anything. My 'sona as a NSFW artist is very confident in herself, but my true self does not always reflect this. I'm learning to be better at this, and I think a step in the right direction would be to truly value the art I create, even if it is just pornography.

If you're looking for the tl;dr, here's what's going to happen:

• Billing for Patreon will be paused in January, and this page will, ultimately, shut down shortly after. If you are wanting to save any .psd files before then, now is the time.

• If you have a commission already quoted to you, I will honor it. Any future commissions will be at my revised rate.

• I will be posting the revised rates soon, on my Derpibooru and Furaffinity. Cel shaded (aka my 'simple' shading) will be eliminated, as well as reference sheets. I will only be offering sketches, flat color, full shading, and dakimakura designing. I will also no longer be providing dakimakura printing, but I will be more than happy to provide a reference to the manufacturer I used previously.

Again, I sincerely want to thank you all for your years of support. I hope I explained my feelings well enough. I still love making art, no matter the form it takes. This will never change 💗

Yours,

-Pearly Iridescence