2022 was a hell of a year. I completed 19 pet portrait paintings on canvas, 8 pet portrait ornaments, and 4 original paintings (with plans to make at least one more before the year is over!) The ornaments are something new which I added a few months ago, and thought it was a nice addition to my pet portrait offerings. I am already booked into April of 2023 for portraits! I did my very first chameleon commissioned painting, thanks to my sponsorship of the wonderful Chameleon Forums, and already have two more scheduled for next year, which I am eager to paint. I created a wonderful original painting of a capybara which has become my most popular work of this year, as well as a box turtle, another red fox, and a polar bear.

The natural color style really seems to have taken off this year, with almost half of the 19 customers requesting that style. Which is fine by me as long as the customer is happy!

Etsy Store News

My Etsy Store has been doing very well this year. I changed my blanket printer, and the new blankets are much thicker and softer than the old ones. They also offer two sided printing, which is spectacular, and was an often requested option from my customers! I also added 15oz accent mugs to the 11oz listings, and added some more color options. I added several new holographic sticker designs, including the infamous capybara, gecko, peacock, panda, tiger, and mandalas. I added die-cut magnets, which are cut out to the shape of the animal. There are cool new ceramic ornaments as well, most of which are available in circle and heart shaped. Garden Flags seem to be a popular product, and make great gifts! I added a few wall tapestries as well, and will add more with time. I also have three cool holographic art prints which have a crystal shard effect. This was a unique find a few months ago when I saw another artist selling these prints, and I found the company that makes them and got a few to start.

The Upending of the Normal

This year has been a never-ending shit show for artists all over the internet. I myself have not been immune to the shit storm this year. Personally, I have had to close down two long standing accounts, move my website, and deal with the Twitter fallout by opening two new social media accounts. It honestly feels like the entire internet just collectively took a massive shit on artists this year, and I am so tired of it.

New Webhost

First, my website. I have had a website in some form since 1996 when it was hosted by Geocities! In 2000 I created my own hosted website with my own domain name. My site had gone through countless iterations in the past 22 years, from self-taught HTML, to plug-and-play templates, to a WordPress site. Websites have changed a lot since the early days, and it is hard to keep up with all the changes. I have always been on top of security and safety, and am very careful with how my website is set up. That being said, my former webhost was constantly sending me emails saying that I was over limits, which is impossible, as this site is tiny and uses very few resources. They refused to help me diagnose the problem, so after 22 years I jumped ship to another webhost and could not be happier. It was a hard decision at first, but I am glad I left.

Closing Zazzle Store

Next, I had to close my Zazzle store permanently. I have had that shop since the early days of 2008, and was one of the mass-exodus from CafePress at the time. I have generally been extremely happy with the site and their products. But I can no longer recommend them to any of my artist friends. They have made a series of changes over the years which has really hurt artists and designers on that site, and I almost left in 2020 when they made changes that really impacted the quality of the site. They implemented banner ads for one, which make the site look like a trashy scam site and additionally steer customers away from buying products on the site. Not to mention most of the ads were for actual scam and illegal sites! They introduced collaborations and custom backgrounds, which took away a huge portion of the original designers income from that sale. They also had an issue with products continuing to be allowed to be purchased if the product was a customized one, even if the original product had been deleted.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the removal of the watermark, the increased size of the preview images by almost double, and the implementation of allowing customers to download a full resolution digital copy of the artwork. The changes basically enable thieves to take designs from the site wholesale. I already have tons of problems with copyright infringement, I don’t need to compound it. Not to mention the major lawsuit that Zazzle is facing in regards to possibly illegally obtaining the fonts they use in their product design tools.

So I made the difficult decision to close my store earlier this year. Which really sucks because it actually made me a decent amount of money, their products were great and unique, and their design editor was unparalleled.

Closing my DeviantArt and Artstation Accounts

I have been with DeviantArt since 2006. While they have made changes which have upset the artist community, none compares to the bullshit they puled last month. Not only are they doing nothing to stop the massive influx of AI art on their platform, they are encouraging it by having their own in house AI “art” generator called Dream Up which uses the controversial LAION-5B database that StableDiffusion and other platforms use. This database scraped the internet of 2.3 BILLION copyrighted images without artists consent to train their algorithm, which means the database is highly unethical and rife with theft. Due to this, I abandoned my DeviantArt site and just left up my links.

At the time of writing this article, ArtStation is pulling similar shenanigans, so I have closed that account as well. They have made it explicitly clear in their terms of service that they support AI “art”, and will not ban it from the site. They are also shutting of comments of artists who are protesting. And apparently earlier this year they were also deleting posts about supporting Ukraine from their site. So I am done with them now too.

Social Media

I will not get into the Twitter issue here, since it has been discussed ad nauseum for the past several months and I am honestly tired of hearing about it. I hear worse and worse news about it every day. I honestly don’t want to leave Twitter because it has been a major factor in driving traffic to my Etsy store, especially since Pinterest took a dump 2 years ago and stopped working for me. But will leave if the dumpster fire gets more severe.

So in preparation for that, I have opened two new accounts: Tumblr and Mastodon. I actually had a Tumblr account many years ago, but closed it due to inactivity. Mastodon is very new to me, and so far I have liked the experience. I am stretched kind of thin right now so I think that is enough social sites for the time being.

Reopening TeePublic

I reopened my TeePublic store after it was closed for a year and a half. I originally closed it since I was not getting many sales. Also I really dislike the interface for uploading new art. It is cumbersome, and tedious, and the inability to select different files for each product means that I had to upload new “designs” for different products, meaning a lot of duplications in my store. But since I closed my Zazzle store I needed to make up for the loss of income so I thought I would give it another shot. So far it seems to be doing ok.

Conclusion and Hopes for Next Year

My plans for next year are to basically continue what I am doing already. This year saw so many changes as it is, and I am not really antsy for any other major changes at the moment. I will be actively making spaces in my schedule for original art, which has become a very important part of my portfolio. I will continue to offer portraits, and as always improve my skills and hone my style.

I will be monitoring my Society6 store this upcoming year. It may be on the chopping block if it fails to turn around. I do not have plans to open any more e-commerce stores next year. Instead I will be focusing on driving traffic to my existing stores, as well as adding products and new designs to my Etsy store.

And that is all. Hope everyone has a great new year!