A New Year, Patreon and Begging on the Corner

So Christmas came and went and now we enter into a New Year full of resolve...

...for the record I have already broken one of my resolutions, I am hoping it is not a trend.

Self Marketing has never been my forte. I always feel that inner dialogue creeping in with its insidious whispering...

"You are just going to embarrass yourself"
"You thought you were good enough"
"They (whomever they are) are just laughing at you waiting for you to fail"

So on and so on.

In spite of that self deprecating dialogue, I went and did it anyway. I created a Patreon site. Patreon is an interesting beast, people donate money to you to create or support your project. You in turn, the creator, gives benefits and exclusive content depending on the donation. I like the concept but like anything else on the internet, if no one knows about it, no one comes. If only Field of Dreams' statement of faith were real, you simply build it and they will come. But unfortunately cinema may reflect life, sometimes its through a mirror darkly.

Now, I know I am painting a negative picture, I am really am not, just explaining the tasks of getting noticed. It's not easy and often risking and I have been really good at avoiding rejection, in fact I have turned it into a fine art. In spite of all that, I persisted anyway.

My goal has always been to create and fill a niche that I believe is there, finding the niche takes effort and time that I would rather be creating, but it demands itself to be done. So here I go again, standing on the street corner like a beggar, but instead of a dog, I have a cat on a leash and holding up a cardboard sign with "Help Fund My Funny Book" scribbled on in with crayon. In an odd perverse way, I kind of dig that imagery.

If I have garnered any of your interest, this is the link to my Patreon site. It set up to fund INK, an online graphic novel I have been planning for months and finally set down and began to do it.

So far three pages are up, pages four and five and near completion. You may determine from the style and the amount of ink spilled on it, no pun intended, INK takes a lot of work and frankly I wouldn't have it any other way. I want to be able to take all I have learned about pen and ink and use it to create a world that I could get lost in as well as pay homage to cats that gave me friendship and comfort in my life.

If the concept of subscribing to INK is not something you want to commit to, though if you do you will have access to pages seven days before web release, I have created a Tee shirt from one of the panels. The cat is Mistress Lenore, actually based off of a dear cat that recently passed away at the age of fourteen.  Her name was Lenore and she was the queen of the house.Just click on the image below to take you to the Amazon sales page.

Also as a note:

If you noticed that there was no Artist of the Month Entry for December, I skipped December due to the Holidays. It will pick up again this month.