Since somebody just e-mailed asking if I was still doing commissions I thought it might be a good idea to post something here letting everybody know what's been going on recently.
First of all, let me answer the question that prompted this post.
Yes - I'm still taking commissions.
Actually, there's a longer story there. You see, for the past year I've been working part time at my local post office in addition to doing commission work. I figured that I'd be able to get a more steady paycheck in addition to the boom or bust commission payments and sort of even things out. In addition, for a number of years the holiday season has always been super light for commission work and as this is the busy season for the post office I figured that this would work out well.
This ended up working pretty well in one respect - it definitely made my income more steady. On the other hand the part time job I thought I was taking was part time some weeks, full time others, and more than full times in some circumstances. It made is REALLY hard to keep my commission work on schedule. In addition to that issue my commissions requests just kept rolling in. Big projects like Kingdom Death Monster 1.5 started piling up shifting my schedule further into the future. Where I was used to scheduling 3 months out my schedule was being booked 6 months in advance - Well past the holiday season that normally thins out.
Another thing that really took a hit in this period were my videos. They have always been hard to fit in to my schedule when I was just painting but they became impossible while I was trying to fulfill the needs of TWO jobs. That's why you haven't seen a new video out of me in a while.
With all this in mind it wasn't difficult to decide that maybe I should just go back to painting full time. It's the thing I love to do and the work is there. So as of right now I'm a full time painter once again.
I've actually been looking at the schedule I'd put together based on having the other job and I must say that it does look like a TRIED to account for the fact that I didn't have all day to paint but some months... I'm not sure what I was thinking. In any case, the schedule is going to compress some. I'm thinking that I'll end up moving things forward at least a month for some of the projects that were farther out - maybe even more. It'll take a few weeks before I can really nail that down, but that's what it looks like now.
As for videos - yes, I'm going to try to get those going again. I have some things I want to do, but for the moment they will have to still be on a "whenever I can do them" timeline rather than a fixed schedule. Much as I'd like to make the videos more of a focus they just aren't paying the bills so I can't divert too much of my time to them for now.
Anyway, I'm happy to be back doing this full time!