#so they don't get lost amidst the art reblobs

[njuum]

I never dreamed of being a professional artist, especially working for/at a studio or something, like a lot of artists seems to dream of. I don’t really enjoy doing commissions except for a very narrow spectrum of stuff, and I don't want to commercialise my personal work by selling merchandising like prints, shirts and whatnot.

Drawing is fun, but doing it for money only makes me not enjoy it. Charging more for commissions doesn't make me enjoy working on them any more, nor it makes me want to work on them them any more. On the contrary, it only gives me more anxiety. I’m only doing this because it’s pretty much my only option when it comes to work, and I have a bare minimum enjoyment doing it, everything else available for me now would be straight up miserable.

When it comes to patreon, I feel like I have to deliver something at least bi-weekly, or I don't deserve my money. I know that’s not true, but, realistically, I do need to deliver stuff more or less regularly or I won’t get new followers on any social media, patreon being the most relevant one because it generates income. And if I don’t get more followers on the other social media, such as, twitter and tumblr, it’s very unlikely I’ll get new followers on patreon. Since late 2019/early 2020, I’ve been only losing income on patreon. There’s always someone new who joins, but it’s often followed by someone who was in a higher tier leaving a short time later. There was a period when someone gave a rather generous pledge, but they changed it back later. And, the problem is that if I don’t produce content which is either extremely appealing or produce a flood of content, or if I don’t have the luck of somehow becoming famous overnight, I won’t get more people/people who donate more following me on patreon.

Then there is, at least for me, another issue with drawing for money, specifically that I don’t trust or believe doing commissions for furries is a stable “market”. Yes, furries have been growing in popularity lately, but, who knows how long that subculture will last? Who knows what unforeseen turns the world might take? That was the case with COVID, which made people lose jobs and income, and was probably a major cause of me losing so many followers on patreon. Similarly, USA’s law system recently overturned a decision that was over 30 years old. Some say they seek to overturn same-sex marriage as well. I can see such things affecting the income of furry artists, since a majority of furries are from the USA, and about half of furries are something LGBT+, so, increased LGBT+ discrimination in the USA could lead to LGBT+ furries losing their jobs, which in turn could lead furry artists to get less commissions, since now those people would have to worry first and foremost about their survival instead of buying furry art. But all of this is a post-hoc rationalisation for decisions I have already made.

I got a suggestion from someone saying that, since I don’t enjoy working on furry commissions, I should focus on things such as commissions for companies. To me that is a non-solution to my problem, just replacing one source of anxiety with another, actually worse one, since that sort of work would put me under a legally-binding contract, often with a time limit to finish my work, and very likely under a non-disclosure agreement, so I would only be able to show my work to, say, my partner who lives with me and my one closest friend.

But, to me, that seems more like a desperate attempt by the person who suggested it to me that I should continue drawing no matter what. When it comes to this problem, asking a friend to listen to me will often be unproductive, because so it happens that most of my friends like my art quite a lot, so they are emotionally attached to in in one way or another, and suddenly having the prospect of not having new art by me hurts their feelings somehow. I was actually quite surprised when both people I talked to about this seemed personally offended by me saying “I don’t like doing furry commissions and I don’t want to do it anymore”, they quickly jumped to the conclusion that I don’t want to draw at all anymore, when, in reality, I didn’t say that. They seem to assume that I want to throw everything out of the window and never touch a pencil or look at a sheet of paper again, when I didn’t say that at all. Both people took this to be a problem that needs solving, that Liz is slightly depressed due to the winter, so they just need to be convinced that things will be alright and on some magical day in the future they’ll get a living wage through their art, that it’s okay to not want to do commissions, that they can work with art in some other way instead. Both people only calmed down when I said I could keep doing commissions but more slowly, and also take a break during the winter.

(To me, that sort of emotionally-loaded reaction about others’ decisions in life feels extremely counterproductive, both to the person who took the decision and to their trust in that friendship. Being offended because a friend doesn’t fulfill one’s expectation of being a professional artist is about the same as a parent being angry at their kid because they didn’t win the football tournament, when the kid just wanted to play for fun, or even maybe for winning, but not winning professionally. Anyway, that’s not the main point of this, so let’s get back on track.)

The next non-solution comes from myself, from seeing artists who do this: exploiting my work commercially from every angle possible, such as by selling pins, prints, shirts, hats, and then it spirals down into absurdity with things such as pillowcases, bags, cups, key-chains, any sort of merchandise and useless trinket possible. I have two main problems with this:

First, I absolutely loathe consumerism and consumerist culture. I don’t buy such crap. I think producing such trinkets, which will be disposed of when the person changes their taste is a waste of our planet’s resources. Not only that, it doesn’t hold together if you try to see it from a larger scale, of people buying merchandise for every single thing they like, to support every single artist they follow and so on. I also think it is a rather stupid notion of capitalist societies that, to express your individuality, you must dress like this or that and have this same haircut as everyone else in your club has and so on. I think viznut/pwp’s demo “progress without progress” summarizes this very well. I don’t want to say what others should do and think, but I’m not going to take part in consumerism culture myself. I’d rather wear folk, no-brand and local-made clothes, even if I look tacky, than wear anything because of its brand. And if I do wear that, it’s more because it fits my personal taste and philosophy than due to it being in fashion.

Second, I can’t just take something I put my heart into, sometimes literal tears into, and slap a price tag onto it. That feels vile. I can’t understand how others do it, often seemingly with very little effort. I can’t just take those characters which are a piece of myself, draw them doing a cute face and order a company at the other side of the planet to mass-produce a bunch of disposable garbage with my drawing stamped on it. To me that is pretty much selling a part of myself, selling my soul. It hurts to even think of doing that. Being paid for unique commissions? Sure. Being paid in a donation-like system, such as patreon, for previews of sketches and so on? Sure. Letting others print out my work, for free, if it means something to them? Sure. Working on a collab art book that will be printed out? Sure. Mass-producing copies of my work as a fashionable thing just because uncle capitalism wants to? No, thanks, I’ll pass.

Well, with all of that out of the way, let’s talk about what I want to do. I've wanted to study linguistics since I was 18 or so; I wanted to learn more about Old English when I was 16, and I actually remember wanting to learn Latin when I was a kid. I love understand how language works, and I never get tired of coming back to those same topics over and over. Sometimes I learn a new little thing and I’m amazed by it, even if it’s just a little drop in the ocean of what language is. Heck, one of the main things I care about on my worldbuilding is language. My characters only have a culture and a world of themselves because I needed that to make their language feel more realistic.

I want to study linguistics even if it’s just out of curiosity, even if I get to the end of my course and go, “well, I liked being an artist more than being an academic”. Not to mean that it is mutually exclusive with being an artist, I don’t think it is, at least on a rational level (sometimes I’m afraid academic life would sap all of my free time, but rationally that doesn’t make much sense). Actually, I would die of sadness if I wasn’t allowed to draw, or if I couldn’t draw any more. But I want to work on my personal things because I love them, not because I’m desperate for money, because I need to survive. It’s pretty sad that the world works like that, although complaining about it is not going to change things right here and right now.

Also, unlike many people seem to want nowadays, I don’t want to make loads of money, get rich and then retire early and then spend my time leisurely. All I want to do is work with things I find interesting, until the day I die. If I can’t work with the things I like, I can’t get much enjoyment out of life and it wouldn’t be too different from not living. So, I don’t care at all about making any money from my art, I don’t care about “hitting big”, I don’t care that academic linguistics is not a “profitable” field either. I don’t even care about being popular or “successful”, whatever that word means. I just want to have fun working. If I could live at a place I like, near a lake and go for a swim every once in a while, my life would be perfect. (Maybe I would even enjoy working on commissions if it was more of a side thing, because I do enjoy seeing others being happy from having a personal version of my work. I only hate doing it so much because of the pressure of living up to a standard and needing to “deserve” that money which I was give for my work, because if I fail to do it, I’ll fail to survive.)

Anyway, there isn’t much I can do regarding any of those things right now. Despite having public education, my country has a very conservative/traditionalist approach towards it, which I find rather stupid. If I wanted to get into a public university or get a discount at a private university, I’d have to take either one of two, or both tests; one which is local to each university, and another one which is at a national level and lets you go into any university and get a discount at private ones, as long as you get a good grade. These tests are taken around October-November, over the course of two separate weekends, lasting about five hours each, and cover every singe subject one studies at middle and high-school. Taking both tests gives you a better chance, but you can only sign up for the national one between February and early May, and it is only valid for the next year, which means that if I wanted to go to university now, I’d have to wait for the next year to sign up for the test, only to enroll in university in February/2024. The other, per-university test is held for every semester on many universities, but it does not give you a discount at private universities.

My city doesn’t have a public university, so my only option would be to take the national-level test and get a good grade at it so I could get a discount, otherwise I would have to pay about 200USD every month. Living at any of the capitals on my area of the country is not an option because rent is expensive, living costs are expensive, campii for public universities are often at the outskirts of cities, thus increasing transportation expenses. The capital of my state has a high rate of violence as well, so it’s not a good place to live. I can’t really go live at my partner’s parents’ both because of personal reasons, as well as because they live at one of the worst places for LGBT+ people in this country.

Even without all of those problems, public university teachers here seem to have an ivory-tower-complex, and are often rude and extremely condescending to their students. An extreme example being, TW, a student who recently committed suicide after being bullied by a teacher over an assignment. A more trivial example was my partner having burn-out due to having classes with ridiculously pedantic professors who complained about even a minor deviation of standard terminology on their field. Aside from that, there is also the fact that university courses last around four to five years here, and there is no concept of “majors” and “minors” like in many European and North-American universities.

Okay, but let’s say I could go around all of those things, that the most of them are problems only because I’m so whinny. Could I go to university study linguistics, in, say, Icelandic, Old Norse, Old English or Germanic languages in general? No, because there is no such course here. There isn’t any kind of linguistics course on universities here, not even for our national language or any of the major languages spoken here and abroad. The closest thing is “Letters” which is more like a course on literature, often coming in the form of a licentiate course focused on teaching language, usually aimed at grade school.

So, there it is, I have no option, I live at no-opportunity land. Hence, I have to keep doing furry commissions whether I like it or not. I have to wait for the time when I have the chance to leave this place, so I can do more of the things I like doing with my life. I’ll be really happy when that happens.