Greetings.
I want to share with you a small story of two of my most stressful, blind and productive months of venturing into a short-lived 2D animation career.
As weird as it sounds, I've tried to carve my own path through the internet via a proxy of an edgy cybernun, but today I will speak to you directly. I am a 23 year old Russian male living slightly outside the capital of Moscow, and as I don't have a degree it became somewhat problematic to find a decent occupation after we moved. I've been lucky to find a position at a call-center that involved English and didn't require a degree, but the project got canned after a year and I was stuck in the same predicament. That's when I tried to improvise and dust off my old Wacom Bamboo tablet and try my hand at commissions. Needless to say anything from workflow to payment was alien to me. I knew my art is subpar, but I figured if I sat down and did a lot of average art and it would make the picture look alive, perhaps it could work. So by substituting some skill with persistence I began work on my first animation at the beginning of the year. I used an old version of Paint Tool SAI and an even older version of Photoshop as I can't afford real animation software, so I thought if I just make all necessary pictures I can put them in Photoshop's rudimentary timeline to make animation. It took me 20 full-time morning-to-night-days to make what you see now, sometimes going over 24 hours straight. I started with four sketches, then added inbetweens and ease-outs, then the bell and the cross, then all the coloring and backgrounds. I say it now like I understand what I was doing, but at the time I just did what felt right and tried to reinvent the bicycle each step. This experience made me explore tools I've never used before in ways I didn't know I can apply them. I've made a makeshift preview window by setting a green and a red overlay over sketches where I needed inbetweens. Then, in the end, when I had 36 movement pictures, 5 text pictures and 6 background pictures I would just switch the necessary layers on and off and save frames one by one. When everything was done I was ecstatic. As I released the animation I launched all of my social media and uploaded it everywhere at the same time. I've felt like a king launching an empire by a press of a single button and I humbly didn't expect much, but deep in my heart I wanted an explosion. Long story short this animation got less than 100 views across the board. After several days had passed and the fallout settled I understood that I need to work harder.
I loathe self-promotion and the only way to get notoriety for me was to just make cool things, or so I hoped, but realistically I couldn't keep working for exposure as I was on the clock. A commission came from the place I addressed last and expected the least from, r/artcommissions. My post didn't get traction but someone contacted me directly, I accepted and fulfilled the commission in ~15 days, but it came with it's own basket of stress in terms of PayPal. I didn't know how it worked, the upfront payment got delayed as my account was new, I didn't mark it as completed until I got the other half, so I technically didn't get paid upfront, the constant fear of a chargeback and figuring out how to withdraw anything and whether it was possible at all. My fears were amplified by the fact that I needed that money to pay the bills and if at any step it failed it was time wasted I could not afford to waste. But when it was all done, I did feel like I carved myself the smallest spot under the sun, like I figured out all the quirks and could reproduce this on a regular basis. And despite working all day every day at a rate ~10$ a day, it felt worth it and satisfying to be on your own terms.
Alas, despite both parties being happy with the outcome and with potential for work in the future, I could not share that work publicly as it was NSFW. So before the end of February I've cooked some animated fanart for a game I enjoyed in hopes of some self-promotion. It got good reception in it's dedicated subreddit, but didn't go further than that.
At that point I decided to face the reality of the situation and pivot back. Despite my first commission feeling like the smallest chance and a sign from above at the time, I just didn't have enough work to make it feasible. Long story short, I went completely blind into a field I knew nothing about with the most rudimentary toolkit, committed two months of my life to it and came out with a few people who liked what I did and a single person who could pay me to do it. From when I started doing sketches for the first four poses to when I got my first commission, every day I expected things to go wrong, to get scammed, for technical problems to get in the way, but I got through it. But the explosion didn't happen. As anyone who makes anything on the internet, we all dream to go to sleep and wake up famous. That is what drove me to restlessly and sleeplessly commit to what I did, the allure of the unknown, to see what will grow out of what you sow, to see what happens if you do this or that. Was it worth it? Absolutely. I just have to accept that at the time I can't commit to it full-time. Hopefully I'll be able to do it on the side, and maybe one day I'll try once again.
Thanks for the company.