Changes to the $2 tier.

Hey everyone!

First and foremost, as always, I want to express my thanks to all of you who are here, whether you're a new patron or someone who has been around a long time, I appreciate all of your support greatly.

For a bit of background (especially for those of you who are new) when I started this Patreon, it was my intent to actively create educational material in the form of videos and tutorials. That is, those were the key rewards I wanted to offer and the rest was more or less secondary. I quickly realized that making narrated videos was a lot of work that I was not well prepared for. So after doing a few I switched instead to doing critique streams and they were very much a success! I enjoyed doing them, people enjoyed attending them, and for a few years that was a good use of this platform and I felt that we'd built a nice little community around them.

However, as some of you may remember, I burned out a bit on those in the end too as they still required a lot of labor from me for ultimately not that much money, and it did not seem like my numbers were going to grow much beyond what I had. Around this time, I also saw some changes in my career that made me rethink what I wanted to prioritize, and I realized I would not have the energy to more actively grow this platform into something more sustainable.

So instead of the critique streams, because I certainly did not want to lose the community aspect of what we had going here, I decided a Discord server was probably a good option. And that is where we are today; one basic tier for exclusive access to sketches, and one for access to my (past) videos, Discord server, and dibs on mentorship slots.

Going forward, there will be a minor change to the $2 tier. While a lot of my older sketch and process work will remain exclusive to Patreon, I will no longer be making future sketch sharing Patreon-exclusive. I will still post them here to have them concentrated in one place for convenience, but the $2 tier will effectively not have any exclusive content from here on out, and instead be a "general support" tier for those who want to offer it.

The reason for this is that over the past year I've really been wanting to share more of my process publicly, where I know a lot of people are curious to see and would appreciate it, and do not feel much incentive to paywall that even if it's for a very low amount. Moreover, I observed my process posts getting relatively little interaction (which is absolutely not a complaint, just an observation), so I concluded it just wasn't really worth it keeping them hidden.

My $5 tier will remain the same for now. I have been putting thought into what I want to do with my Patreon if anything and there might be more that I'll want to change in the coming year, but that's still up in the air for now!

Thank you again, wishing you all well! <3
- Cara