I'm Ellen Natalie, creator of the webcomic Furry Experience. Been hearing good things about Weasyl, so I've made an account to explore the website a bit.

If you're interested in seeing more of Furry Experience, check out its' website at http://furryexperience.com

First off, thank you guys so much, you are awesome as always!
I'm still getting supportive, encouraging messages from the last update about life outside of FE. Thanks for sharing your struggle and success stories, how much FE means to you, and your kind words. Been spending the past month seriously looking into what it would take to for art to be a full-time job in my life. Again, I'm hesitant to share about my personal life, (especially finances,) but I'm not the only one who wants to make a living doing what they love - and I hope sharing my experience will help others working towards the same goal.

The first thing Husband and I did, as basic as it sounds, is review our monthly budget. Regardless of where the money came from, we needed to know the bare minimum I had to bring in so we could cover our monthly bills. The total came to be three times what my art income currently is.

Next step was to figure out how much time I had to increase the art income to meet our budget. (In this case, determined by how long our savings would last.) The maximum amount of time I had to triple the art income was two months. Even with the tremendous amount of growth FE has had in the past year, that's still a very short amount of time to generate a very large increase.

Because of this, I'm approaching the dream of a full-time art job in a different way: I've started doing temp work for a local call center, and using the art income to make up the difference in pay. My goal is to increase the art income while decreasing the temp income - this way I can work towards being a full time artist on a schedule that won't risk losing our savings.

(By the way, this is why the wrong page got inked last week - Call center was severely understaffed, and temps were asked to work extra hours. I ended up working several 10 hour days in a row, only to be told I didn't have to that. Temp work is strange.)

So, this year I'll be trying out some new things and old favorites while working towards the dream of full-time artist. Keep your eyes open, and if there's a product or activity you'd like to see happen let me know!

As always, thanks for being awesome you guys. Here's to us all having a great 2016!