I have always struggled a bit with the “rewards” part of Patreon. I have limited time and energy, and with the exception of a period of time during COVID, I have always had other priorities that didn’t lend themselves to the rewards system. That has now changed.

Over the last couple years, I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of tattoos. I don’t have all that many, but I’ve discovered that I find the process of designing them to be very satisfying. I think I want my next one to be a raven, but I want to do it myself. I have the tools, but I currently lack the artistic skill to make permanent marks on myself that are up to my standards. I’m working to overcome the perfectionism, but in the meantime I want to get better at drawing ravens in a way that transfers to making tattoos without the expensive machinery a pro would use. I’m trying to draw one every day, and if I can’t do a whole one, I can at least put a little ink on paper. It also turns out that my various bits of art education over the years have left me better at this than I expected. It helps that stippling is a pretty forgiving technique. The better proportions on the second two are because I took the time to measure and mark a few key distances, rather than just eyeballing everything.

So.

I’m about to have a surplus of raven drawings, I bought some nice cards to put them on, and from now on, every patron giving more than €15 gets one raven drawing with a note on the back of the card. If that’s you, then all you have to do is give me the address to send it to, and request the note. I will post all available drawings here as they become available. Each card is 105x148mm.

As with the blog posts, I’m going to make all of them as good as I can with the time I have, but I’m sure some will be better than others because that’s how this goes. If there’s not one you like available, you can always wait for a better one to come along. I don’t have many currently, but this time next year I should at least have a couple hundred, so supply shouldn’t be a problem, as my hordes of adoring patrons pour in for this exciting and unique opportunity. Patrons will get to see the new drawings as I post them, but I’ll update here as well from time to time.

The only other “reward” I currently have is that all paying patrons get to see an earlier draft of each post.

Next week we’ll be back to posts with weighty subject matter, but for now, you should head over to patreon.com/oceanoxia and sign up for the Raven Tier!