As you may have noticed, lately I've been a bit quiet, concerning my social activities. Not that I've nothing to say, on the contrary, but the last months have been so busy and tough that when I finally had some spare time, I've been too exhausted to interact here or on my socials, and that brought to me many deep reflections, that I would like to share with you.
Since my daughter was born, in September, I saw my daily routine almost destroyed: I think that any parent out there who's reading these lines, know what I mean.
I was prepared, or at least I tried to prepare myself at my best, but I discovered that no matter how many books you can read, how many videos you can watch or advice you can treasure in your brain, when you bring a real baby at home, things just go mostly out of control.
And I'm not talking about only stressful things like sleep deprivation, anxiety and night cry (mostly made by the baby...): I realized that often I just stopped my life, for example, because I simply wanted to look at her while she was sleeping, or just I wanted to physically be at her side. It's pure joy. But still, a time-consuming one.
With this "normal" situation, we had to face some unexpected hiccups, let's call them this way, when we found that Medea was born with some "uniqueness" of her brain that required many scans, exams and hospital visits: again, everything now seems fine and good, but to arrive at this good news we had to (and we will have to) endure a lot of stress, bad thoughts, anxiety and...wasted time.
The Kickstarter fulfilment started with great enthusiasm and punctuality, suddenly slowed down due to a couple of minor setbacks that forced me to stop everything for months, a situation that, if you know me a bit, really destroyed my morale and still fills me with a bitter taste in my soul.
This unexpected delay slows down, in turn, my current projects and I won't be able to open my next KS campaign as I scheduled, which makes me struggle a lot because it really complicates my financial resources.
Despite what you may be thinking, this is not a post made to complain, on the contrary: all these issues, all this stress, once again made me think about how lucky I am as a creator because I can count on a community that, despite an annoying situation, still supports me.
For this, I'm extremely thankful, and I would like to repeat it again: thank you!
Moreover, as I said before, this situation made me think about time: I realize that I'm struggling to balance the times required by the modern age of social, with my job.
It's easy to fix a delays on production: it's just a matter of waiting for the stocks to finally arrive and putting the correct amount of goodies in the right boxes.
But when we talk about socials, well, sometimes I feel like I'm running a race that I won't have the stamina to finish.
I noticed that I'm kinda torn between the will to create contents and give shape to my ideas, and the anxiety of not being fast enough to publish contents at a constant rate.
My job, which consists mostly of painting and modeling, requires a long time, patience and...inspiration.
A proper social strategy, instead, requires publishing something every day, or at least every week. Or at least something at all! If I don't post something every day or every week, the algorithm immediately put my socials at the bottom of your feed, and this is not good for my projects. However, putting out content for the sake of creating content is not what I want to do, nor what I use to do, I prefer to give you something worthy instead of simply...something. It's a self fulfilling circle that recently put on me a lot of pressure.
I'm writing this post as a kind of therapy because I noticed how this "hurry" is affecting the quality of my projects: for example, I'm stuck in a kind of creative limbo and when I found some rare time to dedicate to some hobby tutorial to publish on my website, I just made a mess one after the other.
I tried to paint one of my dwarves, but the result was terrible.
I tried to sculpt a scenic base for a tutorial, but the result was terrible.
My brain can't stop thinking about all the wasted, precious, time resulting in a horrible ending.
I know I sound silly, but it's frustrating to have many ideas in mind, sitting in front of the desk full of enthusiasm and then...nothing good happens.
Then I start to think about my social pages that look abandoned and I feel guilt.
At the moment, I'm still struggling to reschedule my daily life, I feel like there are some huge concerns that prevent me from enjoying the creative side of my job, but I think that it's only a matter of taking a big breath and slowly reclaiming my daily routine.
I think that as soon as I'll manage to send out all the KS rewards, a big part of me feel free to embrace new projects, at the moment I confess that I feel guilty every time I dedicate any spare time to something that is not strictly preparing rewards for shipments: again, it's only a matter of time, I suppose.
Well, after a long pars destruens, that I hope didn't bother you too much, let's jump into the pars costruens and let's talk also about positive things and good vibes because ok: maybe many things are not getting exactly the way I expected them to be, but there's still plenty of room for some positivity, in this post.
First of all, the last character designed for our range of big scale figures is ready!
What I'm talking about? Well, soon you will see, I won't spoiler you our first Orc..oops!
I'm pretty HYPED, concerning this range: I think Valerio and I did a solid work on these characters, realizing some of our very best creations (I'm in love with "Lunchtime"!).
Despite it will be slightly delayed, I can't wait to start another journey on Kickstarter and I already can feel the mix between pure terror and excitement that only an upcoming campaign is able to give to a creator!
This campaign will see not only our brand new sculptures, designed specifically and uniquely for this scale, but I plan to offer a very limited edition of some of our existing characters, scaled up in 75mm scale!
I already have in mind which kit would gain the most from an enlargement, but I'm open to your suggestions and requests.
I designed this range to try something different from my usual pipeline, and to make a product more interesting for painters out there: it will be fun to see how the community will react to these new sculpts!
Initially I planned to open the new campaign in February, but I think I have to delay it in March, or at least I want to ship at first all the Elves' rewards: a new KS campaign requires A LOT of energy and enthusiasm, and I honestly don't want to have some skeletons in the closet that might affect the result of a project that I invested a lot of passion and money on.
And you? How do you recover your mojo, when you get through a stressful time?