New Year, New Goals!

Happy New Year! Let’s start with a nice virtual hug. Come on, bring it in! We all need a nice, solid hug. The new year doesn’t mean things automatically change for the better (or worse), but that symbolic fresh start sure is nice. I don’t know about you, but I’m not aiming for any resolutions this year. Rather, I want to focus on a few goals (is there a difference??).

Early last year I made “createm0de” officially a small business, which meant doing quarterly taxes and all that fun stuff. At the very end of the year, I got the last little bit of paperwork (that I kept forgetting to file for about 8 months) that finally buttoned up all the official-ness of my little business. Did I make any money last year? LOL hell no! But I did nab a few commissions and (more importantly) have found some super amazeballs supportive friends. My goals last year were to make this thing a business and to have x amount in sales, and I did both, so what about this year?

Goals, goals, goals!!

First goal – I want to complete more pieces in a more timely fashion. While I’m happy I was able to get commissions done pretty quickly, my personal projects took way too long and many still aren’t done. On top of that, a lot of it is fan art and I can’t do much with those except say, “Hey, look at this thing I did!” That’s great, but I want to sell prints without getting sued. So expect more original art, more quickly!

My last piece from 2020. Completed 12/31, started at least six months before that…

My second goal I already touched on – more prints! Also more merch in general! I’d like to have a nice offering of shirts with my goofy cartoons, but also prints of the stuff you guys get to watch me create on stream. I actually find it fun to plan and design these things, so I’m carving out special time each week just for prints, shirts, and whatever else looks fun to make.

Finally, there’s social media. Yeah, I post stuff, but I’m not nearly as consistent or tag-savvy as I need to be. So again, more planning and probably scheduling posts ahead of time. This means keeping this site up to date, promoting my work more, and growing my stream. There’s also YouTube where I plan to start posting my VODs on a new channel and more edited fun stuff on my current channel. I’ve got special time planned each week for that, too!

But how to measure?

There we have it – three goals for this year. But I think to really accomplish them I need something more measurable to go by. To produce more art, more quickly every art stream needs to start with a sketch and one of those sketches should become a finished, fully painted piece every month. That leads to goal number two, where a new print and a new shirt (or other item) should come out each month. For the third goal, I’d like to get back to posting a YouTube video every week and post artwork (even if it’s just a sketch) at least three times per week.

If all goes according to plan, we’re going to have a lot of fun this year – and beyond! I hope the universe starts easing up on us all sooner than later, but for now let’s plan for the best we can do and take things as they come. Whether you have resolutions, or goals, or just want the powers that be to settle down a bit – you got this!