>>2629090I'm ayrt, I work and do cons in my off time, I come directly from the artist alley thread.
I work a boring job but it gives me fixed hours and fixed pay with no bullshit in between (it will never happen that my boss will call me randomly when I clock out or during my off days), I use that money to invest in my merch, my merch gets sold for x5 the price. And I still have somewhat, free time to see my friends.
I am my own art ceo, so I choose how and when to work with my art, in my brief experience with editors (I was still in school), those fuckers would pay me per page (and not per hours) and one page would take me to one to three hours depending on the complexity, but same pay, would call me randomly at night because they got a call from some oversea company that wanted help (usually in Asia), wouldn't understand that my day off was my day off because no day off exists in the comic industry (their words), it seemed like such a fomo world to live in, it's hell.
I get that some people like to do art but are not creative, meaning they prefer to work on other people's projects, but when I realized that I was getting stressed because not only I couldn't do my stuff, so that meant no free expression and my inspirations were turned down, I did stuff that I despised for pennies in strange moments of the day because my boss chased the last project and wanted to call dibs on that. What.
I'm doing okay financially and mentally by not being in the industry because my sanity has no price and my sanity is restored by being in control, maybe I'm a bit of an autist, but having no control in a creative job field is the perfect recipe for hell, for me. Once I hired someone to help with my projects but I paid them by hours and not by stuff they did because I know how frustrating that can be, in the industry this concept is alien because some old moid says so, no, you get cucked, I won't.