Tattorack
Commission Status and Prices
Got some house-keeping to do so that people won't be left in the dark. This journal is important to those that have commissioned me in the past and/or are currently on my commission list.
Without any further fluff, let's dig in.
My current list is as follows:
Tsiica
- Nude quadrapedal female dragon presenting herself, in a cave filled with treasure with
falling water in the background. Tail and butt up.
Jovial
- Avali character reference sheet. Galaxy in right eye, normal left eye.
Odyssey
- Timber Wolf character reference sheet. 20 yo. Muscular/athletic. 274cm tall. Bright blue/icy eyes.
Nude and clothed versions:
Clothed; Flak jacket, bare-armed. Ripped camo pants. Holding shotgun.
Nude; Black fur all over. Sizable knotted penis 25.4cm and large testicles.
Two expression faces; Angry snarling and looking lovingly down at someone.
Tsiica
- His female protogen leaning on her sword in a tired and worn manner in the aftermath of a great battle. The scene is a molten magma world with damage of the fight clear in the immediate surroundings.
A shattered moon hangs in the sky.
Inari
- A quadrupedal male 9 tailed fox sitting down and looking at the viewer. Snow-white fur
for the most part with black fur on the tail tips and on the ends of his paws. Has blue eyes.
Osuenn (patreon)
- Unknown
Qorto (patreon)
- Unknown
That's a lot of stuff that needs to be done, and there is coming one slight wrinkle:
On the 29th this month I'll be traveling to France to visit my family there. Due to the previous job I had and then later on COVID-19 I hadn't had the chance of seeing them for over 3 years. But with my new job giving me holidays and with COVID-19 becoming a more stably managed problem I've taken the opportunity to finally go see my siblings again, as I've missed them and they've missed me a lot.
I'll be taking my laptop and my drawing tablet, both being small enough to fit in hand baggage... more or less. However, this does mean that me finishing work on my list will be slowed down.
There are still 2 weeks and I'm hoping to be done with Tsiica's last pin-up scene before I go.
For now my commissions are also closed. Although travel is not the main reason for that...
PRICES...
This... is going to be the interesting part of the journal, one where I hope to get feedback on, because...
Recently my landlord has increased the price of my rent to accommodate the price increase of power usage. Now... "landlord" is a rather strong word here. Me and a few others are essentially sharing a house and it's in his name, but my computer is apparently consuming enough power that it's putting strain on the original distribution of costs.
My rent has increased by 500 Danish Kroner, which roughly translates into 82 United States Dollars. My rent now takes up 75% of everything that I make from my job, leaving me with very little to use on personal bills (i.e. my phone bill) and food. I basically run completely out of money before the month is over and that's with strictly rationing what I spend on food.
Making money on the side with art commissions was a life saver if all I had to spend on it was time. But now simply turning on the computer is costing me 500dkk, so in order to make drawing commissions worth it I need to make more than 500dkk every month.
I could take in as many commissions as possible, but the current stack of commissions are already taking me more than a month to complete, so I'm actively losing money making them, to about the ring of 100 to 200dkk. So giving myself more work, which will take longer to complete, completely defeats the purpose.
I'm a cheap artist. For the hours of work I put into drawing a single character, I am dirt cheap. Let's not pretend here, I ask waaayy below the minimum wage. Looking at other artists of my skill level and the prices they ask I could easily ask 200 USD or more for a full body, shaded and coloured.
But the main issue is, of course, reach. How well do people know me?
Well... most of my returning customers are attracted to my art because of how cheap it is. They can't afford higher prices. The circle of these people is also very VERY small. At most... 14... I think.
And outside of them?
Nobody knows me.
I've been posting my art to the internet for 9 years now. That's nearly a whole decade. Mostly original aliens and spaceships first, but slowly getting replaced by furry commissions. And in all that time my reach has never been beyond 20-odd people. That doesn't make for a very wide and variable audience. Meaning that if I change my prices to something that they cannot afford (which is literally anything above what I got currently) I will risk losing them and be left with nothing. No side-income at all.
I was hoping that doing the Sergal Server commission (the one with loads of characters in a space bar) would make a large enough splash. But either because the time it took to complete or the fact all the people together had the stability of a card-castle balanced on a pinhead, it didn't. And like everything else I post on the internet, it only got marginally noticed.
I also have a Patreon. Had it now for 2 years active. And in those 2 years it had grown to... 4 subscribers.
If I could make enough money from Pateon just to pay for my computer's power consumption (which would require just 50 people subbed to my lowest tier. A very tiny number of people in comparison to Patreon) I could just keep my prices as they are now.
But just like everything else I do, my Patreon doesn't have reach, and when I try promoting it on servers and such I generally get met with annoyed groans.
So that's my current dilemma.
I can't make enough money from my current commission prices to literally keep my computer turned on to do them.
But increasing my commission prices will push away almost every regular customer I have, with an almost guaranteed zero chance of replacing them with people who could afford new prices.
And what would I even increase my prices to? I was thinking just a flat 2x increase on everything, but... will that even be enough? Should I push it to 3x?
Ugh...
Either way, until I have an answer to the problem, my commissions are closed.
(P.S. obviously not gonna demand that people that are already on the list to pay more for stuff they already paid for. Just saying in case anyone gets worried I'm a dick or something. XD)
2020: Year in review
I remember looking forward to 2020, with 2019 being an all round awful year. Christian Faber had been teasing Bionicle things for a very long time and eventually we even got a date for something. I was also going to get a chance at entering a 3D design course at a university, a possible career setting prospect. A long time friend was planning on making a visit to Copenhagen all the way from Romania. I had spent a wonderful new years celebration that time visiting the family of a beautiful girl. Yes, 2020 was going to be an improvement over 2019.
Then it started with SARS-COV-19. Everything went tits up. No classes, no Bionicle, no summer visits from friends, no holidays to visit my family in France. People getting knee-jerk panic reactions to the pandemic and emptying supermarkets of the most useless things. People not taking the pandemic seriously and endangering others. People flat out denying the pandemic is real, amounting the situation to yet another conspiracy theory. The effects of climate change setting everyone's back yards on fire amidst the outcries that climate change isn't a concern or isn't even real. Racist, corrupt policemen killing black people in the most fucked up way possible, resulting in a completely useless riot that achieved absolutely nothing. The biggest irony being the charities that popped up to help black owned businesses rebuild after the Black Lives Matter riots destroyed them. The areas that decided to police themselves but ended up in complete anarchy with literal murder happening. "Let's replace the police and be better than them" they said, while proceeding to be much worse than the police. China being China to Hong Kong. That's still happening, by the way. Star Trek still being owned by CBS, a company completely bereft of any inventive, inspirational and progressive talent of any kind. My potential future girlfriend parting ways because apparently what I had to offer wasn't good enough for her. That was shortly after I had spent two whole weeks of my life trying to create the most advanced painting I've ever made, testing my theories and pushing my skills to the limits, to make what was essentially a stylised portrait of her for her birthday. Not to mention the money I was saving to plan for a second date. That money went into bicycle maintenance.
I'm sitting here trying to think of something, ANYTHING, truly positive that has happened in 2020, but it's really hard... Nigh on impossible. Especially after the day before yesterday (at the time of writing) my bicycle got stolen right when I was starting my work shift. It was the last work shift of 2020, the potential for a nice fat bonus, ultimately securing my ability to upgrade my PC in January. But I need my bicycle for my job, and it got stolen in the 4 to 5 minutes I spent in a Lidl to buy a bottle of water.
No, 2020 was not a good year. Not for the world and not for myself. Nothing went right. Nothing went smoothly. Personally I've achieved very little of anything this year.
I simply... Made do.
For more neutral things:
I'm still working on a large commission for a Discord server full of Sergals. While the concept and payment was done in autumn 2019, actual drawing started at the start of 2020 in January. Before that people were still deciding where all the characters were supposed to go.
This means on the 1st it will have been in progress for a whole year. Barring some minor edits, I want to focus on actually completing it, so I won't be taking commissions until it's done.
Once the Sergal Server commission is done I'm going to hunt for a programmer. Something I was hoping to achieve much with this year was Nach, the game project I spent years struggling to bring to life. But I'm far better with designing and concepting than I'm with programming, so large portions of the time were spent on banging my head against a wall.
Those are the plans for 2021. I so hope it's going to be a better year...
MERRY JULETID!!
I was gonna write "glædelig" but for some reason DeviantArt wont let me add foreign characters in the header.
Anyway!
I wish everyone a merry christmas, however you celebrate it, from the original pagan way to the modernized corporate way. While most who read this likely will have to celebrate these days in isolation due to the pandemic still haunting the Earth, I do hope there is still some merriment to be had. Make yourselves some hot chocolate! Drink some spiced wine! Call the friends and family who couldn't come! Snug yourself in a blanket and enjoy a classic movie! Share some christmas themed art!
Wherever you are, whoever you are and whatever you may be doing:
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
Well, It's my Birthday
Today I'm 27 years old. I have survived another 365 days on the little wet rock whizzing about in space we call "Earth" (whoever was responsible for the naming of our planet wasn't the most inventive person for sure). 27 years old and I still... don't feel any more grown up then my age would suggest. One whole orbit was completed and I'm still alive, somehow. Considering what I've been put through in all that time it's quite the achievement.
But lets see what happened in all that time then:
- I've been rejected from university, twice. One digital design course (they said I wasn't talented enough) and one 3D design course (they no longer had any place left). Now with coronavirus haunting the 2020s getting into uni this year will even be harder.
- In Autumn of 2019 I was given the biggest commission to do I've ever been given. It's still not done. 
However it's certainly something that lets me flex all my skills on.
- I got a place to live where I could set up my PC once more, retrieve my game files and restart my game project again. Now Nach has found a new home in the Godot engine, although it's still VERY early on and learning coding while also doing everything else on the game is a bit of a chore. But it's coming along, if slowly.
- Work has been... hard. I work for Wolt, food delivery by bicycle, and COVID-19 has made people lose most of their jobs and other incomes. These people have used Wolt as a fallback to keep afloat, which means a lot more couriers... but not enough work schedules to go around. Keeping afloat myself has been... tricky.
- In December, before the whole corona stuff hit Denmark, I asked someone out on a date! For the first time ever! It didn't go EXACTLY as planned but I had an amazing time and I believe so did she. Now I just need to figure out how to go on another date with her. First the COVID-19 stuff needs to go away, then I need to see if work gets better so I can save up again. And then... who knows?
Those are about the highlights I can think of in the 365 days leading up to my 27th birthday. That's... not a lot of stuff happening in a whole year but then my life isn't super eventful either.
But hey, I'm not complaining!
I'm still alive and I got plans on achieving things before the year is done!
Anyway, that's it from me.
Hope it's as awesome a day as it is over here right now!
That Fresh Car Smell
Like holy shit, does DeviantArt suddenly look different!
I mean, I don't hate it. I still gotta see all the pros and cons of this new layout, but this does mean that I got a massive amount of rearranging to do and.... a cover art to make! Like hell yeah, DA supports cover art! Feels a lot more like ArtStation now.
Everything looks so dark, though... probably it's all supposed to be filled with art, but right now there are large areas of black emptiness all over.
Still have to figure out how all of this works.