Reflections 2023

I felt the need to write another reflection post because I experienced some interesting developments recently.

By coincidence, I wrote "Reflections 2022" almost exactly a year ago. My plan was to create a series of images that capture bitter-sweet feelings from my childhood.

I am pleased with the images I painted in this one year period, so much so that I replaced the portfolio on my website with some of these images: "Little Star Dreaming", "Mid Autumn Festival", "Warm Ramen in a Cold Winter's Day", "Year of the Rabbit", "Little Witch with Frizzy Hair", "Broom Ride!", "Spell Cast!", "Mermaid", and "Hi, Mr Whale!".

Along the way, I found myself liking "witch" as a theme and adopted "witch series" as a theme. The theme in my mind morphed into "draw witches with things associated with childhood".

In terms of painting, I developed the following standard practices:

• Colorize inked lines.
• Overlay a low-opacity layer of blurred inked lines.
• Invert some part of inked lines as glow lines.
• Be conscious of applying cool and warm colors.

In terms of monetization, I started a print shop at INPRNT.

I followed this plan until end of May 2023 with "Hi, Mr Whale!".

In June 2023, I wanted to start accepting commissions and had to adapt the plan. I did not get a strong positive reaction from the childhood-themed images. I need to explore adjacent ideas:

• Keep the witch theme and experiment with graphic elements in character illustrations. Outcome: "Punk Witch" and "Flame Witch".
• Draw images that make audience recall their childhood. Outcome: Cammy fanart. My logic is admittedly roundabout. Street Fighter is a nostalgia for me. Recently "Street Fighter 6" was released. so why not draw a SF6 fanart? Looking at the new roster, I liked Cammy's new design and so Cammy fanart it was.
• Draw images of special dates with children's point of view. Outcome: "National Day". In the coming months, I plan to draw one for Mid Autumn Festival and one for Halloween.

While preparing for sample images to accept commissions, I found out that I had only one sample bust image, so I painted another one, "Everything Goes According to Vegeta's Plan".

Mid August I started accepting commissions. I learned quickly why commission artist do not use Instagram for commissions. I received at least 3 direct message requests that turned out to be scams. Their characteristics are:

• The requested image is not related to my art. The requests are pet pictures, even though I do not draw pets.
• The requesters are eager to pay more than my price. A common tactic is to ask for multiple images.

The first time I received such a DM, I followed through with accepting the order and requesting a down payment. The scammer (a she) insisted on using PayPal. After I sent my PayPal link, she claimed to have sent $200. To add to the urgency, she attempted to audio call me via Instagram. She then sent this line: "The money has been deducted from my account kindly check your paypal email address inbox and spam too,the last mail I got from PayPal got hold on my spam". I did receive an email in my spam. It was a phishing email sent from a Gmail account pretending to be PayPal. I don't remember the content of the email, but I remember it saying that the payment of USD200 exceeded my PayPal daily limit and that I should click links to remedy this.

It was interesting and infuriating to learn about art scams firsthand. I know now why commission artists do not use Instagram to accept orders. Too much time wasted on scams. I still do not have a good solution to this issue.

Sadly, I have not gotten a legitimate commission order yet.

Finally, let me share another story. By luck, "Hi, Mr Whale!" got a Daily Deviation feature on DeviantArt. The effect was gratifying: I received a lot of love and comments, some of which seem legit. Of course a lot more are most certainly bots. In addition, I received a number of chat requests that are most likely scams. Some are even exact copy-paste. All of them ask to purchase one of my artworks. I do not know the aim of these requests; I simply ignore them.

I share this story because I start to see the scams as a balancer to the gratification of getting a Daily Deviation. I realize that (1) getting attention was luck and (2) many people use social media to get attention.

As for my future plan, I am still hoping to accept commissions. I am figuring out how to strike the balance between convenient ordering and filtering out scams.