LAD 5 - The Man of a Thousand Hats
And the art of juggling them all
Remember when you were a kid and had like endless hours of nothing but boredom in your hands? When not even TV could fix it? I wonder where all that time went.
As it’s been a while since my last newsletter post, here goes a kind of “what I’ve been up to” update in general:
🔸 As I write this, I just finished assembling a quite intricate set of spreadsheets to help me make better quotes to clients based on my own personal data and courses I took on the matter some time ago.
🔸 Also, on Valentine’s Day week I was finishing a set of holiday sticker designs (more below) which took me longer to finish than expected, listening to business audiobooks in the meantime.
🔸 I’m also becoming active on Kids Comics Unite again via their Studio program, as to push and hold myself accountable to move my MG comics creation forward for once. This has been a long time coming.
🔸 And as if I wasn’t spinning enough plates, I have just passed the 200-day streak record on Duolingo studying Japanese while dodging the wrath of Duo should you skip a day of practice. I’ve wanted to visit the country and delve further into its culture since long ago and while I still don’t know when I will fulfill this wish of mine, it’s better to prepare beforehand. 今日本語学生です！1
😐 On a less funny vein, I feel increasingly pressed to make money again ASAP amid a bone-dry economy, so that’s why I’m prioritizing the actions and work offerings more conductive to it — specially in regards of my UX consultancy work. I haven’t had an office job since mid-2022 and in all honesty, given the current job market perspectives for a 50-year old, it might already be time for me to rather kick off my own little dinghy into the sea and face the raging waters of growing your own business — something that doesn’t come without its scary risks but is also something I’ve rather wanted to do anyways. Sadly, neither my illustration work nor this newsletter are important revenue sources — yet. (Will they ever? In the age of AI?)… I understand, however, that patience and consistency are the keys to achieve great things over time.
In short: I’ve been busy as the hardest working of bees in the hive. With rewards yet to be harvested, or conquered upon. A tough path to walk into. Survive to tell the tale and laugh at everything I’ve mentioned ten years from now will be the ultimate reward.
Speaking of support, I’m widening up my patronage options adding now a Ko-Fi profile. For those of us outside America2 Ko-Fi seems easier to manage and publicize than Patreon, but for the time being I’m keeping both options open — if you like to hear more about my experiences as a global south artist, spread the word!
From the Doodle Board
Aw yeah, about those Valentines stickers I mentioned earlier… here they are. How you like them? 😊
This is the first stickers set I make featuring my original characters — my very first sticker set in fact. I’ve been toying around with the idea of producing merchandise to sell at local conventions because these things do sell way better and are cheaper to produce than books. Most of the offers go around fan art of popular IPs but I’m not much into that. I don’t care being labeled a sellout, but at least I want to try it with my own things…
Anyway, these were fun to make and I hope to do some more in the future.
Noteworthy Finds
✨ University of Chicago’s Nightshade is a generative AI deterrent application that allows artists to “poison” aka misdirect training data picked by AI rogue Internet scrappers to feed AI datasets. I am using it on the images accompanying this newsletter and am happy to see image artifacts being toned down to an amount I can live with. Still, Nightshade demands huge amounts of computing power; my Mac Mini with 16 gigs of RAM barely makes the mark for optimum performance (about 12-15 minutes per image with default settings). It is expected a web-based version combining Nightshade and Glaze to be released in the near future, for those on even older computing gear.
While I’m still looking for stable work, I made this mini-comic about it to be published on my LinkedIn profile.
✨ I would like to introduce you to the 506 Art Guild (link in Spanish). This is an informal Costa Rican pop art group that started as a Whatsapp chat group in the middle of the 2020 pandemic, as so many online initiatives, and today it surpasses 300 members in total. While it mainly attracts young artists driven to comics, manga and animation, it is actually open to any interested artist of the area. The number 506 isn’t arbitrary — it’s the country’s international phone code.
It’s been a while since my last newsletter, but you know — life happens sometimes. Your comments, likes, restacks, etc are more than appreciated — the more people this newsletter reaches, the more I can justify placing time and effort into making it. For now, see you on the next one.
—Beto
“I’m a Japanese student now“ 🇯🇵
As in the colloquial name for the country, not the continent from Alaska to Argentina. Yes I know it’s culturally wrong and inadmissible U.S. people label themselves “Americans“, but after working with lots of people remotely in the U.S and in my country I decided that was a battle no longer worth fighting on my side and just go with the flow and let people be. You do you.