Artist of Nothing 001 - June Newsletter
Meet the artist
Hey there! My name is Antonio Tyler. I’m a part-time webcomic artist and illustrator, and have been drawing off and on for over 20 years. I tend to draw cyberpunk art, but I’ll also draw anything from superheroes to slice-of-life comics. Currently, I’m mostly an all-digital artist, though I have taken class and self taught myself in traditional methods as well. I live in the Bay Area of California.
First half of the year recap
I ended up closing my Threadless store for a lot of reasons. One was the durability of printing for several t-shirts, particularly on heather t-shirts. Yes, the shirts often were only $15 for customers, but they should last more than a year! The second reason is that sales were low, despite having my designs in the Threadless Marketplace and on the Hot Topic website. Nearly all of my sales came from my storefront, so the added eyes on the other storefronts amounted to nothing. I ended up switching to Printful, and getting a website started on Squarespace. However, it’s been a struggle, mentally, getting that off the ground
I had very ambitious plans this year, and ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos on yearly planning, productivity, and running an art business. But when push came to shove, I really struggled. I was in a funk for a lot of the year, busy with my day job, and finding less and less time to draw. And when I did have time to draw, I often had terrible art block. I struggled with my art process, and was frustrated by low engagement.
Not all was terrible. I did a great job networking with other artists, reworked my plans, and decided to pivot away from engagement on social media. Social media is essentially dead, so my website, newsletter, and other outreach is now my focus
June plans
Cara
Boy howdy was there an exodus from Instagram. Cara exploded in users when Meta announced that they would begin feeding users’ images into their generative AI. While some users outside the United States could opt out, users in the US found it was almost impossible to do so.
I was on Cara before this all went down. It offers Glaze, an AI disruptive technology, for free through its website. For someone who doesn’t have a desktop device that can use Nightshade, it was the next best thing (though Ibis Paint, the drawing app integrated their own AI disruptive tech into their app)
Reset and going foward
For June, I’m planning on finally launching my website, storefront and newsletter/blog. I’m planning on releasing some Ibis Paint brushes for free. I’m also going to start on my cyberpunk webcomic, Only Human. Though, with Meta doubling down on Instagram’s AI scrapping, my original square format page idea might change.
I also need to figure out some way to do blog post on Squarespace; trying to do this on the iPad via the web and iPadOS app was a nightmare.
