Hey, my Squids.
The title for this might seem very alarmist. If you’re a fan of my webcomic, Taliah, reading that might seem like I’m quitting or stopping. I want to assure you that isn’t the case. There will be a brief break in releasing new pages but I mainly want to talk about the why’s and how I’ll be adjusting my release schedule going forward.
As you well know, the current state of the US is a bit of a mess. Being an adult and having a family, I know that there are things I have to do to try to protect them as an uncertain future looms ahead of us. Unfortunately, this means that my time, focus, and attention aren’t vested in writing or drawing a comic. I’m having to do things regularly that I normally wouldn’t, so by the time I would have an inkling of time to actually work on anything creative, I am completely spent. In these cases, trying to force myself to work on anything creative generally leads to burn out.
There have also been some lifestyle changes. Our schedules have adjusted, so the times that I would normally get to work on and in my creative space for hours on end are, for now, gone as I need to go to bed earlier and get up earlier than previously. By the time I get a small segment of time to work on anything, I’m too tired to focus, so I spend the time playing video games instead. That works an entirely different set of muscles than the creative ones.
I also currently work a normal 9 to 5 in the same location that I do my creative pursuits, albeit at a different desk. After work, I like to leave this space for awhile so that I can decompress from the area before returning to work on my creative things. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to be creative outside of this space and, thankfully, I can do that with my iPad. Except, now that I have a one-year old dog, you can probably imagine that trying to do anything creative around her is next to impossible. After all, pets require loads of attention and care, and younger ones even more so. She can’t enter my creative space but I can’t really focus on creativity when in the spaces she occupies, which is where I used to do a lot of my studies and catch-up work.
With all of that said and feeling at an all-time low when it comes to my abilities and talents, I have found it very hard to work on art for the last couple months. I’ve tried to force it and struggled regularly. I’ve taken a critical eye to my work and come away with a feeling of ineptitude and sloppiness. I feel like I’m not a great artist or that my work isn’t passable and because the amount of time I could use to try to study or work on pieces has shrunk, I don’t feel like I can adequately correct my shortcomings in a “timely” manner. This leads into further burn out and hopelessness.
I have unreleased pages I’ve completed for Taliah that I don’t like. They were done in a rush or when I did not feel my strongest in completing them. And I think they bring the quality of the material down with them. I got to thinking about what I can do to adjust how I approach this story and its release. Right now, a page or more of Taliah is released every two weeks on Fridays. The truth is that schedule is exceptionally ambitious and if this was the only thing I did, I would be able to maintain it admirably. But that schedule requires that I don’t partake in anything else outside of it in its current form. it means I can’t do studies or one-shot illustrations, I can’t edit videos or do video reviews, I can’t take a break for a week to play my favorite video games just because I want to, and I can’t plan trips with my family because my day to day is so packed or my attention pulled from creative pursuits that I can’t effectively work on them even if I have a small spat of time. I need something less strenuous but still schedule oriented so I have a timeframe to complete my tasks. Something that allows me more flexibility day to day but can be done within a solid time frame. I need freedoms.
I’m going to take March off from releasing Taliah pages. I want to spend time doing studies, working on my art, and making it better; correcting my anatomy struggles and drawing pieces that I can be extremely proud of years from now.
In April, I’ll have a new schedule. Each month, I’ll release an update for the webcomic at the end of the month. Whether it’s a single page or multiple, I’ll update the webcomic at the end of the month. Patreon will be a month ahead, so I’ll resume public updates at the end of May.
This schedule change means I can spend some time working on studies when I do get an hour a day to draw. It also means that I don’t have to worry whether I’ll meet a two week deadline to get a page out and drop the quality. I can spend time refining and correcting what I’m working on so that it looks better than before.
But… there’s also another upside to this: I can make a few one-shot comics. I have hundreds of short stories, novellas, and novels that I’ve written over the course of my life and a large number of them would work wonders as short 3 to 6 page comics. I can also do one-shots that take place in the world of Taliah, things I’ve been wanting to draw but didn’t have time because of my release schedule. I can also focus on more one-off illustrations, things I use to help me try to level up my abilities, things that I also use to “reset” my comic brain and to fuel the desire to pump out a load of panels in one go.
In short, Taliah will update again on Patreon at the end of April and publicly at the end of May. Any pages that were in the pipe to update on Patreon will still update but not any from Friday, February 21 and after until April. I want to take March to work on reconnecting with drawing and trying to work on the things that I think hold my illustrations back. I appreciate you coming to read this quirky little webcomic of mine and I hope that you’ll come back when I resume releasing it. Maybe I’ll have a few other smaller comics for you to check out then, too.
Thanks for everything!