State of Jackary - June + July 2023

Hey guys, as you know, I had a really quiet month last month, and I've been pretty silent up until now in July as well. I wanted to make a post explaining what's been going on, and what you can expect moving forward!

If you've been following me on Twitter, most of this is already public information, but since you guys are my biggest supporters here, I owe it to you guys to explain the whole situation!

Just to be clear before you read this - June was the "struggle month" but things have been taken care of, and as of July, I'm no longer in a stressful situation, so this isn't a "pity me" post -- I just want to let you guys know what's going on! That being said, July [might] be a bit slow too, but for different reasons, which I'll elaborate on below!

JUNE 2023

As many of you may know, I had a huge payment of $10,000 due by the 1st of July. This is a home-related expense we incurred last year (AC), and we chose the deferred-interest plan, since Jess had a solid job and I was making enough with art to cover our expenses. This means that we had one year to pay the entire amount, with no interest. But, if we missed the deadline, we'd get slammed with all of the incurred interest, which was set at an extremely high rate (17%). It would also damage our credit score, among some other unsavory consequences.

Unfortunately, it wasn't too long afterward that Jess got laid off, and things took a turn for worse on my end, with Elon buying twitter, my engagement rates plummeting, and so on. So for most of this last year, we've been living paycheck-to-paycheck and haven't really been able to save much money. To our dismay, June 2023 arrived and we still had to raise the entire 10k in one month. So I got to work.

In a nutshell, June was not productive art-wise because basically every thought of mine for every minute of every day was bent on how to raise money, and I spent the majority of my time working to that end. THANKFULLY, I raised the money!

A ton of time was spent creating, manufacturing, fulfilling, and shipping merchandise orders. I launched a ton of new stickers, and because I'm a one-man show with my shop, fulfilling orders can suck up entire workdays. I also launched my "ALL OF THE ART" digital pack, which I gave you guys a discount to, and it took at least a week of worktime to get that whole thing assembled. 

I ended up raising the money though! Between merchandise, commissions, the art pack, and donations from some very kind-hearted followers, I did it! We're freee!

JULY 2023 - WHAT TO EXPECT

Thankfully, although I achieved my goal, I had to put a lot of work on the backburner to take care of that stuff, and now July will be a game of catchup. The first week of July has been spent taking care of loose ends (like fulfilling the last of my pending orders), taking some much-needed rest, and taking care of some needs in my personal life that were being neglected due to the June hustle.

July 2023 will be spent taking care of art obligations that I still owe to people, rebalancing some stuff IRL (such as getting the house clean and reorganizing my workspace), and taking a much-needed vacation. 

I anticipate being able to get more art done this month than last, but maybe not by a lot. We'll be taking a vacation to California the last week of the month, but in the two weeks leading up to that, I hope to get some stuff done! Most of the work will be variants of existing drawings that I still owe to various people. Once I get all of these pieces done, I'll finally be in a state where the majority of my work is fresh new drawings on a much more frequent basis!

Here is what I would like to finish this month if the stars align:

• Goth Tharja - Awakening Outfit variant

• Zelda and Hilda - Underwear Variant

• Spellthief Lux - Bunny Suit + Underwear Variants

• KDA Akali and Irelia - Various Misc. Variants

• New Drawing - Winter Mercedes (Three Houses) + Nude + Underwear)

• Pyra and Mythra - Zero Suits + Outfit Swap Variants (likely an August project)

Once I finish up all this work, I will have a totally clean slate, and I will be doing much more sketches, original work, and community stuff, like polls, letting you guys pick out my next drawing, and so on. Thank you for being patient! I appreciate you guys so much!