If you saw some guy in a Luffy cosplay wearing glasses and a Luffy pin holding the strap on the Straw Hat together, that was me.

What do you do when you get paid big cash for working throughout an entire month? Make poor financial decisions is what. And my way of making those decisions came in the form of a local convention I went to this month. In all seriousness, it was genuinely such a fun experience not only being around various other nerds, having people recognize me as Luffy, and calling every other Luffy there "Bon-Clay" and "Bon-Chan" (peak character btw, so glad she's in a lot of the games) but also because of the artists that were around. Only now did it fully set in that I was not the only one around my area making cool art, and I'm so glad there were so many other artist checking this convention out. I took my sister along as well, and she had a great time, buying some stuff of her own.

Something that I had considered doing at other conventions was to try and talk to the artists who were at their alleys, or at least talk to them more... but honestly I felt like I would come off as creepy if I were to try that... but I still wanted to show my support to their craft, so I just went and bought a bunch of stickers, pins and keychains from them instead, that way I could at least financially support them. But this time, I decided to try and show my art at least and I got a lot of lovely reactions from so many artists. Many praised my work which really boosted my confidence in my own abilities for one thing, which I felt was really needed after my whole episode of constantly wondering "what exactly am I good for...?" for a good couple of months there. The best part was how my sister got inspired to share her art as well and she got a lot of praise as well for everything she had done. Two encouraged me to make a game with my skills, one asked why me and my sister didn't have a table set up, I let some artists know about a local shop that sells stickers, keychains and other knick-knacks made by local artists, and one let me in on a local sticker maker in return. I also found an artist who made Divorced Dofladile (Doflamingo X Crocodile but divorced) keychains and earrings and I decided to introduce them to MelonTeee, mainly because I had a strong feeling her videos would resonate with them, sweetening up the deal by mentioning how she's a lesbian ZoSan (Zoro X Sanji) shipper, so her opinions can certainly be trusted.

Besides those artists though, I also ran into a few comic artists, some who have worked on the industry for a long time and some who went and launched their own comics. I bought two graphic novels, one about a zombie apocalypse but with Disney styled cats called Feral and another made by a metal band called Punk Rock Time Machine, both of them even signed by the respective artists at the booth. There was another person who did tarot readings, and figured "Yeah sure, why not get a reading while I'm here". The first time I truly learned about tarot cards was through Persona 5 and I've held some respect for them since then, reading a bit more about the cards and where else they appeared in other media, but this was my first time getting a proper reading. So I sat down, decided that I would let the cards do their thing without my input and watched as the fortune teller did their thing with their Fallout themed tarot deck. And y'know what? The cards read me pretty freaking well. They correctly read my passion for the jobs I held, the fact that I wear my heart on my sleeve but also have difficulty expressing myself, and the fact that I had recently developed feelings for someone... then they told me that 18 is my important number for fate... So that was an experience, we'll have to see if anything happens on the 18th of this month. I had a few other minor experiences happen as well, such as someone giving me a Luffy sticker they bought because of my cosplay and the fact that I ran into the same Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers cosplayers three times during the day. I high fived both of them during the third time while we were leaving lol.

I also got to high five Sean Chiplock, tell Jamieson Price about how he'd be the perfect fit for Brewster should an official Animal Crossing Movie dub come out, show Melissa Fahn "Cowboy BeBop at His Computer", and a pic and autograph by Maurice LaMarche while he complimented my cosplay (He didn't know who Luffy was but he liked his fit). Sean and some other voice actors actually did a panel and mentioned how companies especially like to hire voice actors that people are passionate about and y'know Sean... I gotta say... I'm very passionate about voice actors, I'm so glad they exist to breathe so much life into all sorts of characters, I get excited whenever I hear a familiar voice come out of a character's mouth, and I love hearing about everything that goes into voice acting. In spite of all that though, voice actors are criminally underrated and I strongly feel that they deserve so mucn better. Sean I may have flubbed up my words with you, especially the first time, but it's because I've heard you in so many characters and I just didn't know where to begin or what to say to someone like you. You may see yourself as some average guy, at least that's the vibe I get from so many other voice actors, but regardless... thank you for being so kind and patient to this awkward Luffy-cosplaying guy. You made his day.

Ah yeah, commissions are also open once again, recently finished one up too. $45 as a starting price. Ya want more info, check out the Commissions tab. I styled the sheet after older fighting games in the 3D era because I thought the look of those games had a lot of charm to it, and also because I figured a mockup character select screen would be much smaller and less of a pain to deal with compared to my first sheet.

And now for a list of artists I met at this convention from taking their business cards and pics of their fliers

• Lamify
• MEELEE ART
• Punk Rock Time Machine
• Midorichann
• Tori's Wandering Brain
• Paul Kear's Madness
• 8Bit Bytes
• The Space Patrol
• Mel Ramos (They gave me the tarot reading)
• Pokeharvest
• Mel's Log Comics
• Artistbonzie
• Luly's Art
• Irish Punch Workshop
• homodachi
• Lonnie Millsap
• JikoAiShop
• Justin Greenwood
• Banbuds
• Duckmeat!
• KimPerley
• AstroPanda Art
• IzelIllustrations
• Arucan Eat!
• Moonkee Art
• Solzey
• Solthrys
• geek fine art
• eleeza
• The Astonish Factory
• Sword and Stars Art
• StefMinnie
• nekomimipunks
• Hollow and shoutout to their contributions to the Victor Learning Center
• Morgan Becker
• harvestkitty
• Sunflower Comforts
• Paiislley

And just for the sake of it, here are some artists I met at other cons

• Lemon-Crème
• kn56k
• Tara Nighs
• The Grumpy Cookies
• Joey BlueJ
• Stardust City Studio

Update

Ultimately broke up with iframe in favor of web components for the container and footer.

Update 2

Added older art, drafts and scraps to gallery

...Welp, what was supposed to be a summary of what I've been up to turned into an entire vent. If you wanna hear me spill my load, look below. Anyhow, raffle never happened lol, may or may not try again idk. I'm gonna open commissions again soon though. I'm also joining Art Fight this year. Gonna update the page too with the power of adderall by my side (What that update was originally gonna be about, got prescribed finally). Overall, things are better than before.

WARNING: Vent Below

Update 7/25/25: Felt a lil uncomfortable with this just being here, apologies

Yup, it's official, I will create you things if you pay me. After waiting so long for some sort of call back from a variety of places, I decided to take financial matters of some form into my own hands. The Art and about Pages may be completely generic and barebones but goddamn did I deck the hell out my Commissions page. Then again with that I at least had a frame of reference in the form of my commission sheet, which that itself was an entire beast which i had to try and figure out with how ambitious yet big the gif size was. Like it's a work of art to me but too much of a work of art for other sites to handle (33MB) and not to mention even when I finally got the gif compressed enough to where it looked fine on the surface, it was indeed not fine when I sent it into Discord. I may have to make a new static version of the image in this case.

As for the commissions themselves, I've honestly been wanting to do commissions for a while now but I've never had the reach nor the experience necessary to tackle such things until now. Not only that but the number is also growing at a steady pace the more I casually post my art and shitposts. It... makes me feel seen y'know... like these cool people I look up to, I'm technically among those ranks. Nowhere near as big but every now and then I'll see some relatively big artist like one of my art pieces so I at least know I have my foot in the door with the community as a whole. Who knew that simply participating in online art spaces would get you some sort of notice.

Speaking of online spaces though, I actually recently reached a 300 follower count milestone on Bluesky and I only noticed how close I was just a few days ago. So of course we have to celebrate this sort of occassion. I'm going to do a raffle... at some point idk just yet. Listen I'm still pretty new here and I need to get some stuff worked out first, but I do want to do a raffle. I still have like eight more requests to do on top of two more potential projects on the horizon and on top of the usual life stuff, but I still want to do a raffle dammit, I want to get good at low poly models to where it becomes second nature to me. Because I know this has potential of some kind for someone like me.

That aside, I've set a goal to start a raffle the day before the Half Off Sale ends, if not sooner... Oh yeah my commissions are starting a half the usual price until March 11th. so if you want a low poly model of yourself or your friend or anyone's OC for $15 at the least, please consider my deal. In general though I'm honestly just happy that I'm able to do low poly stuff in the first place... like... at all y'know? And if it gets me sime extra money so people can't totally say it's useless or futile, I'm doing what I love and I'm getting paid for it. That's all that matters to me. (Just saying though, I'm still hoping to get a tech job of some kind in the future, if you know any openings in the Pacific coast especially then please reach out like genuinely I am so tired of being ghosted all the freaking time in job application sites and even in person to an extent)

Man it has been quite a while since I updated here huh... this is absolutely going to hurt my GitHub commit activity... But why the long wait? Another hiatus maybe? Nope, me not updating was just an unintended side effect of relearning Blockbench to make a low poly model on top of an upcoming interview that past week (I did not get the job =[ ).

So yeah me not landing the job did hurt me a bit, even though I had a bit of an expectation that I was just inherently unprepared considering it was my first real interview and even though I reassured myself that more opportunites would present themselves in due time. How did I cope with this? By finishing up a low poly model I started on days before the interview, the healthiest coping mechanism imaginable.

Really though, after I finished my model it genuinely energized me after I was done, and it happened again when I was nearly finished with another model. Seems dopamine really is a hell of a chemical huh, no wonder humans are super curious, and it's that desire for creation that makes me want to do things like programming for a living.

Right now though I'm feeling in a better enough mood to go about the hunt again. In spite of the hellish conditions in the US there seems to be more job openings for programmers and I even got a tip from my coding teacher to ensure I land a job. The only issue being that it would mean locking myself away in my room to work on a project for days on end, not being nearly as efficient akin to whenever I learn something new so I need another source of revenue to justify doing that in the first place. And since the places I've applied aren't calling back so far I've started looking into opening commissions for low poly 3D models akin to the one I'm showing right now. I took up a handful of requests already and on top of that I still need to finish a site for an IRL client.

In the meantime I'm opening up the art page and will soon convert it into an Art/Comm page for people to send request for commissions over. When they open up the plan will be to price MOTHER 3 sprites at $10 with walk cycles being an extra $2 and low poly models being $30. So long as I'm making some sort of income this should be sufficient.

Update Feb 24

I'm preparing a commission sheet right now and I'm going to use this site to host my ToS. I also decided to just make art and commissions their own pages.