02.04.2025
Hi, this is your digital artist, Punny. Today is February 4th.
Sometimes you sit down and don’t know what to write. That’s why a good plan organizes your efforts.
Today, I’d like to share how I chose the story for "Witch’s Pie".
For a long time, I worked on Upwork, but greedy executives started forcing freelancers to pay just to look for jobs. After doing the math, I realized that to land a single gig, I’d have to spend at least $100 or more—with no refunds or guarantees of getting work.
Maybe for some people, that’s not much money, but paying just to "try" to find work? I’m from a poor country, and I didn’t even have that kind of money.
After leaving the platform, my next step was to build my own brand and name.
But again, I needed those same $100 (or even $1000 at once) to invest in advertising… and I didn’t have that either.
So, I poured all my efforts into creating valuable content for the art business and projects, hoping people would come to me instead.
You can draw beautifully all you want, but without a story that touches people’s souls, gaining fans is nearly impossible.
At first, I considered a story about super-agent girls. They lived in the modern world and, after receiving new technologies from a UFO, helped investigate and prevent crimes. Here are some of my concept sketches of them.
I knew that drawing and popularizing a single story could take up to five years! Yes, five years. There’s an actual science called statistics. In your business, you need to calculate everything.
I often see artists boosting their illustrations with ads, getting 30,000 or even 200,000 views. But what does that really give them? Their illustrations all look alike, and AI can work much faster than they can draw.
These artists get fleeting fame but don’t actually build anything.
I needed to build a "brand", and that would take over five years. The audience today doesn’t even want to subscribe. Ten years ago, you could gain followers just for your art, but the new generation rebels against being "asked" to follow!
That’s why it’s so important to genuinely love your own story—otherwise, you’ll burn out after five-plus years of working on it.
I realized I didn’t want to draw cars and robots, I was tired of that theme, and I craved something more “cozy.” That’s when I started researching RPG worlds… RPG games are super popular for relaxation!
The funniest reason I had was: “I don’t want to draw modern houses and cars.” Hahaha.
Then, while browsing Pinterest, I saw tiny elf mages. Inspired by their designs, I sketched my own.
At first, I wanted to make them chibi (small and cute), but after consulting with a robot (oops, yes! Hi, GPT!), I always consult with a robot—of course! GPT advised me that for an action genre, battles, and to make characters more relatable, it would be better to draw them as teenagers.
And that’s how Rui, Meffi, Dichi, and Lina came to be—the characters you can see in my gallery.
Choosing a story resonates with you is crucial… I thought about what matters to me and what could matter to others. And I realized—it’s friendship.
Yes, the pain of when your best friends become your enemies. If we don’t discuss this traumatic experience so many carry for over ten years, we’ll never be able to grow!
In my next post, I’ll talk about how I rewrote the beginning of the script twice and defended my ideas against someone who had won a Hollywood award for screenwriting.
manga, punnypanda artist, how to build a business for an artist