When Life Gives You Lessons...

Issue #24

General Updates

Two weeks, we’ve got to stop meeting so suddenly like this. I’m never ready for it anymore.

Another blink and you missed it two weeks have flown by, and once again I find myself a little disappointed at my progress with The Chosen One’s Mentor. But, two weeks from now my time will have freed up a lot so I’m hoping for a final sprint at the end of the month to hit that deadline of a January 1st release date for chapter one.

Granted, the concept of getting chapter 2 out anything less than a month or two after that seems an impossibility. But we’ll see what happens.

In a lack of TCOM-related updates, I do have updates on other fronts, though.

Namely that I have a couple new toys in my life, and they make me very excited for the upcoming future.

I’m the proud owner of a nice printer and a cutting machine now. Or, at least, I will be the proud owner of both soon enough. Still waiting on the printer to come in the mail and hope this time it doesn’t have a faulty pump.

With these, I’ll officially start tackling the thing I had set out to do forever ago but never got around to doing: making products to sell. Art prints, stickers, t-shirts, whatever fun or creative thing enters my brain, these will all soon be makeable and sellable!

When I’ve not been working on TCOM, I’ve been trying to get those projects I mentioned previously off the ground and adding a few more to my list of project ideas every few days. I have a ton of ideas and I’m excited to get to a place where I can start marketing them for real! This will involve online marketing as well as starting to poke around getting into some art fairs. It’s something I’d been wanting to do for a while, and now the fire has been lit in me to stop stalling and get to it.

It’s funny what having less time in your day to work on your goals does to your motivation. For many, it’s an easy way to kill any motivation you had. I know I definitely struggled with it in the past. Many days after a hard and long day of working a regular job, the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and do more work.

I think that’s why it’s so important that I had a taste of what life is like when you just get to spend your days doing what you love, and then to have that taken away when the need to refill your bank account kicks in. As I’ve slogged away at a day job, I’ve been consumed by a singular desire: to get my art career to a place where it can support me so I don’t have to work a job again.

The sad truth is, I lazed about with the idea for too long. I let myself get complacent with the thought that “I’ll make this work eventually.” And then reality kicked the door to my office in, dragged me out, put me in a company uniform and told me to work my ass off for minimum wage.

And, God, it’s sucked. I’ve been looking back at all my decisions over that last couple of years and kicking myself for not being more proactive sooner. It’s my own fault I ended up here again. And I’m not keen on letting it last long.

Which is why I’ve already put in my two weeks at my job….

Well, I did it to get back to being an artist and because I had fundamental issues with the work I was doing that I couldn’t ignore after only a few weeks of being there. But both reasons factored heavily into my decision.

The point I’m trying to make with this slightly meandering rant is that I’ve learned a valuable lesson in these last few weeks. When you find something that makes you happy, you’ve got to work your ass off and chase after it relentlessly if you want it to stick around.

That’s what I’m doing now. I’m chasing my dream relentlessly. And it starts with getting things set up to sell my art. It starts with dedicating time every day to working on projects no matter how tired I am. And, if I’m lucky, this time I’ll start seeing results.

And if I’m unlucky, well…maybe my next job will actually be part time and won’t pay minimum wage for professional work. Tune in in, like, probably four to eight newsletters to see what happens.

With that said, time for an extended project updates section to talk about what I’ve accomplished in these two weeks with my new toys and my newfound motivation.

Projects Updates

I did what I promised I would last newsletter. I finished another dragon in the bathtub piece.

This one, again, feels like it needs some color work. I definitely struggled a bit with changing my mind on the colors while I was working, and I’m afraid that shows in this piece. Or maybe it works? Honestly, I’ve been staring at this one so much I no longer know if it’s any good or not. I sort of wonder if after I finish the other two in the series if I’ll just redo this one to fix my color choices.

But, hey, I did it! On to the next dragon.

In other news, though I’m still waiting on the printer, my cutting machine is up and running, and I’ve been having a little fun with it learning the ropes.

I started with a neat little decal for my water bottle.

Then I made some proper titles for my work boards.

Then I tested the vinyl iron-on tools I got with a shirt (if you know what this is from, you know.)

Then I put my old artwork to the test and cut out the phoenix symbol from TCOM.

Though this one needs some refinement and I think I need to get into doing vector designs so that my edges are cleaner for the machine’s design app. That’s exactly why I’m goofing around with low-stakes projects, though. So I can get the learning kinks out of the way before I try making anything I would want to sell.

I’ve had a lot of fun with it so far, and I’m really looking forward to that printer arriving so I can make stickers, prints, and heat transfer some t-shirt designs. I have so many project ideas in my head, and I hope to have a ton of them ready to market by the end of January as a goal.

But that’s sort of all I have to say on the update front for now. The day job has, unfortunately, absolutely obliterated a lot of my available time and often left me so tired that my productivity isn’t nearly where I’d like it to be. Just have to hang on a little longer though.

I know, realistically, that the chance of me making enough money from art to pay the bills any time soon is…unrealistic. I know, odds are, I’ll be on the job hunt again sooner rather than later. But I think I needed this brief experience with a job to teach me a few things.

First, that I shouldn’t be afraid of setting boundaries for my work-life balance. That nuked me right out the gate and going forward I plan to be clearer with my intentions that I only intend to work part-time hours.

Second, that being an artist is my calling. I was fortunate that this job did have a creative aspect, and I saw very quickly that people were acknowledging my skill level, which was a nice confidence boost. Now I just need people to like and want to buy my art instead of the art I produced specifically for my clients.

And third, that there’s no such thing as wasted effort. If this job has shown me one thing, it’s that the experiences of my past have given me tools I can use today. Despite being a major introvert, I have a “people mode” I can turn on thanks to my days as a teacher. Years of technology usage growing up in a tech-savvy household, working with various pieces of equipment as a theatre technician, and being a computer programmer have made it so things that seem difficult or unfixable to others with technology are no big deal to me. And lastly, and most importantly, I’ve experienced from so many jobs what good and bad leadership and work structures look like. Thanks to that, I know the difference between disliking a job just because it’s a job and disliking a job because it’s genuinely a bad fit for me. One you can suck up for the sake of a paycheck. The other you need to run from as fast as you can. So I have no qualms about my decision to leave as soon as I did.

A Look Ahead

2026 is almost upon us. And I don’t know about you all, but I’m planning to make 2026 my year. I want to look back one year from now and say with confidence that this was the year my life as an artist truly kicked off. I’m planning to start the year strong with the first chapter of TCOM getting released, and though I can’t promise a lot of chapters will come out in 2026, there will still be plenty of NiccoKnack content to take in over the year.

I’m looking forward to it. I hope you all are, too. There’s still one last newsletter between now and the new year, so I’ll update you all one more time before the new year kicks off. Till then, thanks for reading, and here are a couple more sneak peeks at the progress of the first chapter of TCOM for your dedication to reading my rants.

Till next time. Have a good one.