Actually why you could do this and what arguments and reasons I have for this.

First and most important:

I used to think that drawing was very promising for me. And most importantly, cool. I could study drawing all my life and only became more skillful and professional. My works would become more and more epic and amazing other people. I thought that over time I would still become a cool artist like Karl Kopinski, or I would do everything in my power to at least get closer to him. That I will be able to sell my work and meet death without being homeless, but that I will be able to somehow leave this world with dignity. 10 years ago I bet on this and everything went very well and seemed to go according to plan. I was proud of my progress and looked with a smile into the future, in which only good things awaited me. 

But just recently people came who had never drawn anything in their lives and said the following: “Now we will make money on everything that you, artists, have created over all these years, and you will have no opportunity to compete with us.” And it became bitterly clear to me that the bet was a “loser.” It is obvious to me that my profession as an artist will most likely not exist in the near future. This may change and artists will continue to earn money somehow, but the profession will no longer exist. Most cool artists work for hire, most often in the gaming industry. Obviously this won't last very long. I have already seen several game projects that did not use live artists... There are most likely many more such games in development now. So I think this will end in a maximum of ten years (my average pessimistic forecast). I've thought a lot about this question. This honestly depresses me incredibly. Realizing that you lived your life in vain is not such a cool feeling. 

For me, in terms of orders, things have gotten much worse. From the outside it seems that people are helping, I constantly post posts that I signed as orders. And it seems like I have a lot of work to do. That's right, there is work and there is a lot of work... But there is a nuance...

The fact is, most of these orders are cheap orders. And this changes a lot. This is an important question that solves a lot. To explain it, I even made a graph to make it clear how much this affects my situation now.

Imagine that the blue bar (x) is the time per month that I can spend on work. And the orange one is the time I need to complete current orders that will cover all my basic expenses for the month. That is, it’s ideal when I have enough time to complete all orders and I have enough money to pay for everything. That is, when x=y.

Before the war, when I lived in Russia, everything looked like this:

In Russia, everything was much cheaper, and there were no expenses like “let’s just pay you 1,200 euros to us now so that you don’t get kicked out of the country right now. Then it’s true that you will still have to pay a lot so that you don’t get kicked out, but for a start, so be it.” You can’t imagine what a joy it is when you don’t have to pay money just so you don’t get kicked out of the country. In Russia I had a lot of free time. I could afford to borrow a computer for $2k. I could play computer games. I could work in 3D, since the computer allowed me to do it. I could take part in art challenges. I could draw all sorts of cool things for Instagram that I wanted, like the cybersoldiers that I recently posted (more precisely, like butiday ;) . Which, by the way, greatly helped the promotion of my Instagram. Everything was great for me!

But then it was all over. And I had to greatly increase my efforts towards fulfilling orders. Because the orange line suddenly increased many times over. I needed a huge amount of money. And I had to greatly reduce the price of orders, otherwise it would not have worked. But the worst thing is that we still didn’t have enough money. And then I had to take more orders every month than I could draw in a month. And the amount of money that I needed per month turned from x=y to x=y+a.

(everything here suddenly turned into pseudo-mathematics, sorry. Next there will be some logarithms and two complex functions and that’s it. Just kidding, it won’t :)).

That is, I no longer have enough time to earn the money I need per month. The expenses turned out to be more than the amount that I can earn working all month. And it turned out to be a progression. That is, the number of orders beyond my capabilities increased every month. Now everything looks like this... :

To be honest, I knew this moment would come. I understood that by taking cheap orders, I was digging a hole for myself. But I couldn't do otherwise. Either take all the orders that are offered, or live in a fascist dictatorship, where LGBT is an extremist organization and pretend that this does not concern me. Plus, as a bonus, you can also go to a Gulag-level prison for liking on social networks (do you think “Gulag” is a fancy word? No, it’s not...) or die somewhere in a trench in a foreign country like the last asshole. Well, I think you understand. I decided to stick with orders until my last strength. I currently have over 130 characters in my queue... I also try to draw up to three characters a day. This very rarely works out and takes up all my time. The weekend has long since entered the blue stripes. I have a feeling that I simply don’t understand what’s happening around me anymore. Every morning I read at least 10-20 inboxes. Most of this is edits to what I did recently. The rest is a question - when will I start doing something with the order. Sometimes there are so many messages that I simply forget to respond to some of them, simply because I was distracted by something. I'm incredibly ashamed that I don't have time for anything. And even now, when I am writing this text, I am haunted by the thought that during this day that I spend creating this message, I could draw at least two drawings. But I've been putting it off for too long. An incredible number of orders have accumulated. Even if I stop taking orders right now, it will still take me about 3 months to end this vicious circle. Now imagine that I got sick for a week or some things came up in the category of “you must urgently spend 3 days on this or deportation” or I simply no longer have the strength to move the pen on the tablet.

Well, then the day came when they were very rude to me in a private message. I’ll be honest, I knew that this day would come too, obviously, but it still turned out to be incredibly painful. I have a huge number of seemingly valid reasons, but in this situation I still cannot be right in any way... In general, the collapse of this system in the future is obvious to me, perhaps I will hold out for another year, but over time this growing snowball will devour me. From me to the sea, you can get there in 2 hours by train. We haven't been to the sea this year...

It is very important for us to move to another country. This is incredibly important. All the previous points will be simply meaningless if we don’t move. There are several explanations why this is important. But first, there are important advantages that are still important at this stage. First of all, we are very grateful that such a country exists and that it has sheltered us. We were lucky that we were able to enter here without a visa and that we obtained a residence permit relatively easily. That we now have no questions about where to live and how to eat. But then the nuances begin again... Firstly, complete uncertainty in legal terms. 

The simplest example that happened quite recently. Initially, we were able to get a residence permit here due to the fact that we opened a company here in the name of my girlfriend, and I was accepted as an employee. That is, we have created an official enterprise and, based on the fact that we pay taxes here for our activities, we are not thrown out of the country. We did everything as legally as we could. But here they passed a law, in September, it seems, that Russians who arrived cannot obtain a residence permit if they are not employed full-time. That is, before it was possible to get a part-time job and everything would be legal, but now it’s not. It would seem okay, you didn’t give a damn about the fact that people are actually fleeing the war and decided to get more money from them. Okay, not very morally good, but acceptable. But it turned out that this is not all. We also now need to pay one-time taxes for the entire time that we have been here, the difference in salary. It’s as if we had full-time jobs all this time. This is almost 3000 euros one-time. 

That is, once again. They are retroactively making us pay for the period of time that existed before the law was passed! In any developed country, this is legal nonsense! In all developed countries, the law is not retroactive! You can't pass a law that everyone owes the government $1,000 a year, and then say that this must be done for your entire previous life. And then say that here is another new law, not 1000, but 2000. And so on. It's incredibly simple! But here, in relation to us, this is the norm. All the time there are some wild rumors that they want to do something against the Russians. It's like we're constantly on a powder keg. It is also as if we are naked in legal terms. There are a huge number of precedents about how it is impossible for Russians to win in court against a local resident... And there are a huge number of such things. We don’t even understand what to do if we have any problems. It would seem that there is an opinion in the world that Russians should suffer, because things are much more difficult for Ukrainians now. Missiles are flying at them, and here I am telling you that I am worried about the local legal system. But the same applies to Ukrainians!

Here is another example that told me a lot about what awaits us here. This was in the first days when we just moved in. We live in a good area. It would seem that somehow everything should be organized and legal. One day I go out onto the balcony in the evening and see the following. The car was parked in the oncoming lane, on the roadway, at a pedestrian crossing, right at the intersection opposite the bar, right on the markings... The driver simply stood on the markings, turned on the emergency lights and went into the bar... In the oncoming lane... We were terrified. The car stood there for about an hour. We live in the capital, in a fairly new residential area and this is one of the main local roads. In the oncoming lane, at a marking, at an intersection... Those who lived in corrupt countries, I think, immediately understood everything. 

But our lack of rights and the general situation with the rule of law here is not all. All these reasons have their results. Medicine here is absolutely unviable. I am 41 years old, I lived in a country with a rather low level of medicine. It's high time I treated a bunch of little things, but I won't do that here. In Russia there is a saying: “They don’t heal, they cripple.” Judging by the reviews, this is exactly the case here. Our age makes us think more about our health. It is incredibly important for us to get to a country with good and working medicine.

And the last argument about the move. Remember, I wrote that I need to buy a 3D printer and learn how to use it. So, I tried to do this. Firstly, when I realized that this was, in principle, one of the ways to improve my financial situation, I still decided for half a year to do it. Extra money for me is always not extra money. I wanted to take advantage of Black Friday and order a 3D printer online for as cheap as possible. But there is a nuance... It turned out that a $500 printer would have cost me about $2,000... I'm not joking, I'm not twisting it, I'm not trying to embellish it. It was fucked up trying to resolve this issue. It turned out that the import of 3D printers into the country needs to be formalized in a special way at the Ministry of Economy... 3D printer, 2024, permission from the Ministry of Economy... Let's say. You need to submit an application, pay a fee, and that’s it. It would seem that at first glance everything is simple. I hired a translator for an hour (yes, we have to do this all the time when the issue needs to be resolved with local authorities) and went to find out. It turned out that in principle it is not difficult at first glance. Complete an application in the local language, pay the fee and that’s it. I decided to place an order on the Internet, but when I started filling out the delivery column, it turned out that delivery here costs +500 dollars. That is, plus the full cost of the goods. That is, there is free delivery to a country 70 kilometers from here, and $500 here. At this stage, I already refused, since it turned out to be twice as expensive as what we could hardly afford for the new year. But as we were told later, that was not all. At customs itself, when the goods arrived, we would have to pay another amount of money, which is equal to the full cost of delivery. I don’t understand why at all! This is some kind of insane hell. And also, most likely, we would have to “negotiate” with the customs officers themselves, but this is naturally not certain... Well, Kickstarter, of course, does not work with citizens of this country... And PayPal, by the way, does not work either. And all these points, as you understand from the previous argument, are critically important to me in order to solve all the previous problems. But moving requires an incredible amount of money. The countries where Kickstarter operates are the most expensive countries in the world to live in. But it’s even more expensive to get there. We face the very last step in our journey, but also the most difficult. Both in terms of our own efforts and in terms of financial investments. Just to show the country we are entering that we will not become thieves there, we need to show about $10,000 each in our account in order to get just a visa. To be honest, I don’t even know the amount of money that we will pay for all the papers, but I think it will be a similar amount.

I have lived my entire life in a third world country. I really want to break into a normal, working democracy and at least spend the rest of my life in the legal field. In a country where everything is organized for the people, and people do not live for the sake of the state. Where there is the rule of law, where there are functioning institutions, where there is a legal and developed economy, and not all this... But most importantly, none of my projects can start normally from here.

My age matters. I'm not young anymore. I could try as before, to go long and painfully towards my intended goal, as I have done all my life. But I’m no longer at that age to endure all the hardships playfully. Everything is already starting to take its toll. Previously, I could sit in front of a computer for marathons, but now it’s much more difficult for me. And I’m afraid I won’t have time to achieve all the goals that I would like to achieve before the end of my life. But thanks to you, I may have a chance to do something positive and memorable over the next two decades. Time, that’s my last argument, it’s sorely lacking. We will still leave this country, but without your help it will take not six months, but several years. I'll still draw the comic, but without your help it will take more than a year instead of two months. And so it is in everything.

That's why I ask you to subscribe to my Patreon. This is necessary so that I can get everything done.

Actually I want to summarize:

Actually I want to summarize. I wrote a long text because I wanted to show that the question is much more complex than just “give me money, I want to buy a sandwich.” A huge complex of highly interconnected problems and tasks that need to be solved has accumulated around me. And the explanation for what is happening is large and complex. To continue earning money, I need to change the direction of my activities. To change the direction of my activities, I need tools. To get the tools, I need to change country. Etc. All causes have interconnection and dependence on each other. I wanted to show that my Patreon is not just a way to make money or a piggy bank for “toys for myself.” These are my obligations to you for your support and justification for why this is really necessary and what exactly it will pay for and for what purposes this money will be spent. I hope my arguments have shown you that this is really not my whim, but a vital necessity for me now and an opportunity to get a normal life, and not just this.

That's why I ask you to subscribe to my Patreon.

My Patreon