Changes (July 2024 Newsletter) (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Its been a little bit since the last big update and Battle Plan so seeing as billing will be resuming soon, I've been taking some time to reflect on what got me to that breaking point to begin with. I do want to say I've been doing a lot better recently. Thank you for all your amazing support even over the break. but as you can tell, I haven't really... taken a break, in a sense. I've still been pumping out content like the machine that I am but this has been a break for me. So what changed? Why do I feel so different? That brings us to the crux of todays update:

I'm discontinuing suggestion threads and polls.

I know. This probably sounds familiar. I've been back and forth on this a lot and if you've been following the updates the past year or so you'll have heard this sentiment before. I want to remain hopeful and say that these might come back eventually but honestly, I think it might just be permanent. I've been realizing something really important to my creative process. I need freedom. Not just in posing or characters, but everything. I work best when I can just follow the thread my brain creates and just run with it. The recent ZZZ animations are great examples. I didn't plan on making those. I didn't have to poll for ideas or set up polls, wait a week, tally results, then get to work. I just did it. I got cracking on an idea that had been polluting my brain for weeks and I somehow accomplished more work in less time than most of my other projects.

Polls have been feeling like I'm just adding more and more onto my plate every time and just keeps piling up. The whole point of the ITLs was to keep a poll structure while keeping the scale somewhat manageable and oops, it only took 2 polls to get back into being overscoped again. I think its safe to say that at this point I know myself. I can't chain down my ambitions. But ya know what? FUCK IT! Let my ambitions fly free! I've shown what I can do when I follow my heart and man I just want to keep making things. I dont want to feel obligated to meet some arbitrary deadline or some objective that I didn't set for myself. I just want to create what I feel like when I feel like it. I want do bigger and better things. I want to animate. I'm so excited to the remaining 2 large projects currently on the docket. I've been itching to do another longer one and I'm ready now. I'm ready to COOK!

All the fanart for my birthday has really lit a fire inside me. I feel so loved and like I actually made an impact on the community, I feel like I've become the inspiration that other artists were to me and that's an amazing feeling. I want to get more people into art, I want them to chase their dreams too. Its all just been making me so happy and stoked to keep moving forward.

Okay back to the serious stuff. With the discontinuation of polls, I did want to take some time to do some much needed maintenance on the page. I've already started updating some of the assets like the banner and soon my pfp and tier banners since some of those are over a year old now! I want to make sure its at least somewhat up to spec with my current content. Secondly, I want to rearrange some of the benefits. Not by much, but one of the big draws of the higher tiers was the voting power. And seeing as that will no longer really apply and larger projects wont have alts the middle tier feels a little lacking. So the main change is really just going to be moving WIPs back into the $5 tier. I'm not going to go in an fix this retroactively again, so this will be a "going forward kind of thing. Everyone still gets early access to completed projects and the weekly doodles (so you know I'm still alive) but higher tiers get to see a little more of what's going on behind the scenes and stay more up to date with the larger projects with the project trackers. Changes will go into effect on the 22nd when billing resumes

So to quickly recap the tiers:

IBs
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Monday Doodles
Early Access
Name In The Credits

BSSs
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Monday Doodles
Early Access
WIPs and Progress Trackers
Alts (If there ever are any)
Name In The Credits

OFs
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Monday Doodles
Early Access
WIPs and Progress Trackers
Alts (If there ever are any)
Source Files
Timelapses
Name In The Credits

And honestly, this feels like a pretty stable configuration to me. I know I've changed benefits around quite a bit over the years so I wanted to try and find something I hopefully wont ever have to change in the future. If anything, I'll add new tiers that are essentially just extensions of the $10 tier or other ways to fund certain aspects of my animations like sponsoring the VA work or getting a dedicated sketch in the doodle pages each month.

Welp sorry for the long read everyone XD but I'm hoping I wont have to make anymore changes in the future. I've been loving my recent workflow and I think I'm gonna stick with it. Its nice being free again.

Thank you again for all your support <3
~ Trevo