💼 Careercow Andrew Dobson (aka Tom Preston)

Estado
No está abierto para más respuestas.
Comment sample
TomPreston's poll Should I Stay on DA, or Should I Leave It - DeviantArt (1).png
 
I love Emo Dobby! He's a middle aged man wallowing in a puddle of self pity and for what? Wife left, lost his job, kids sick, homeless, addiction? Nope, nobody likes his doodles. Just start cutting yourself Dobby, if you wanna OD i'll supply the Flintstone-vitamins. I can't help it, i derive a sick, sick pleasure from this, there's just something so unsympathetic about him.

Hello darkness my old friend, Jesus H. Christ, he can't even get that right. The obvious choice is Paint it black by the Rolling Stones.

deadson dijo:
I voted "stay" cause I'm sure he won't leave, tho he could surprise us and actually leave.
Presiona para expandir...
TyrannoNinja dijo:
I voted "Leave".
Presiona para expandir...

If he leaves (for more then a few weeks) i'll buy a trillby and eat it.
 
Thank Christ the smug St Patricks Day bear is finally gone… only 90 days after the actual event.
 
DvOr2Nz.png


I found it interesting that Dobson thinks he creates one new piece of artwork per day. I thought that was being rather generous. I got sort of spergy, and did the math to see if he was being accurate or not.

His patreon has 70 posts to it currently. Seven of those are updates, and while I'm not sure the exact number, some of those pieces were not finished works of art (and I think one was a time lapse video of another piece he uploaded). His patreon started 129 days ago, so he's already way off. But. if I estimate that 6 of those uploads are unfinished products, then since his Patreon started it has taken him roughly 2.25 days per piece of artwork he's uploaded to Patreon. If we count only business days (Monday through Friday, no work on holidays or weekends), then he takes about 1.5 business days per piece, which isn't that far off from 1 a day, but overall he is way short of releasing 30 a day as he has stated throughout his comments.

If this were a 40 hour per week job then it would be taking him 12.5 hours to draw, ink, and color each of the pieces he's published. I am no artist, but Dobson isn't recreating the Sistine Chapel here. Is this a reasonable estimate? I just don't feel like if I worked for 12.5 hours on something like Dobson produces (and I had a degree in art) that I would be satisfied with the level of output or quality.

He says he has a day job (which can't be 9 to 5, 5 days a week or else his supervisor is really, really terrible for letting him waste all day tweeting), so it's probably unreasonable to expect him to work his job and 40 hours drawing. I think it's probably more likely he spends about 2 hours per day drawing, or about 12-14 hours per week. This would mean he would be spending about 25% of the time he was awake (again not including weekends) drawing, which certainly doesn't seem like the output you would expect from someone who is trying to make cartooning his living. He seems to be putting the cart before the horse, expecting people to pay him before he produces anything.

But there is also some other interesting analysis of this quote. Andrew considers it "a waste of free time" to be "drawing without any sort of compensation". Does this sound like a man who enjoys what he does? I'm pretty sure some of the most famous artists (e.g. Van Gogh) were pretty poor, and created art because they loved to create. If Dobson is concerned about "wasting his free time", why does he spend so much time playing video games? Why doesn't he try to earn more money? Moreover, couldn't he just put ads up on his personal website and get money through that? He could stop uploading to Deviantart, and just direct people to his website so that at least he would be getting something every time people looked at his artwork. He could start accepting commissions again, which if he did 2 to 3 per month would probably earn him more than his entire Patreon. Is his business sense really that bad?
 
Última edición:
When people make a big deal about leaving a website, they never actually leave. It's usually just an opportunity for them to wallow in self-pity and fish for asspats.

Also, didn't Dobson "leave" the internet back in 2012, only to return a few months later? He'll come back. They always come back.
 
Leaving DA by TomPreston on DeviantArt.png


Text-
Leaving DA
Hey everyone...

The Announcement

As you likely know, I’ve been struggling with this site for quite some time now. The constant trolling and harassment for years on end have pushed me to the breaking point. I’ve tried disabling comments to ease up on the hatred of me, but sadly DA is still too broken in too many ways that make it easy for nasty people to continually abuse me here. I’ve tried ignoring it. I’ve tried leaving temporarily and coming back after a hiatus... nothing works. My block list is so full I can’t add anyone else now, so the harassment continues unhindered despite all my best efforts. I continually receive death threats over incredibly petty and stupid things, and trolls seem to relish in lurking in my DA frontpage comment sections (which DA will not let me remove).

The straw that broke the camels back though was a thread on my recent Patreon Plug journal: tompreston.deviantart.com/jour… where I learned just how fucked up the people who harass me are. To make a long story short, I engaged in a conversation with someone who didn’t like my Patreon because they felt I don’t post enough for them to support it. “Enough,” as it turned out to be, was insanely more work than any sane person would be capable to handle (around 30-70 works of fully completed illustration/comics a week), and the amount they expected me to do it for was worse than the minimum amount I was asking for ($1 per month).

I think I have, at long last, outgrown this website. DA is a great place if you want to post art for free and make a start creating... but the second you want to try and actually make money for your hard work, this place turns into “artists should make art for art’s sake and not for money” backlash. And unfortunately I can’t live like that. I need money and support if I’m going to continue to make work. Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon all are doing a lot better at giving me that support (and offer a lot of tools to help curb harassment) than DA does right now.

So yeah... I think at long last I am going to leave DA permanently.

What happens next?

Now into the nitty gritty details of how this is all gonna work...

1. For starters I am NOT QUITTING ART. I want to make that clear. I am going to continue to make SYAC, Alex Ze Pirate, Skyrim, my own illustrations, etc... they just won’t be posted here on DA anymore.
2. I am not going to delete this account. I will leave it up so links to my art and gallery can continue (and to prevent further drama and parody accounts of course).
3. Art has been scheduled to be posted here from Patreon up until August 24th. So while I will no longer be here on DA as of today, for a couple months after you will still see some work from me posted here.
4. The art scheduled to be posted is automated by DA. I have already set it to post, but I am not the one posting anymore.

Places you will still be able to find me at

Like I’ve already said, I am NOT QUITTING ART. You can still find me on a number of different places on the internet. One of the best places to find me is Twitter, since that’s where I primarily interact with fans, and anything I post to twitter gets automatically copied over to Facebook as well. For your reference are are links to all the sites I’ll still be active on:

Twitter: twitter.com/ADobsonComics
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SoYourACartoo…
SYAC Website: www.syacartoonist.com/
Patreon: www.patreon.com/ADobsonComics
Society 6: society6.com/adobson

Currently both Alex Ze Pirate and my own personal website AndysArtworks are down for construction. Patreon support is what has been helping rebuild those websites and eventually they will be back up... but sadly it takes both time and money to do so, so they might be down for quite a while longer still.

The Long Goodbye

I’ve been toying with leaving for quite some time. I’ve been hesitant to because I know a lot of you really do appreciate my work and DO support me and my art. I have around 56 thousand watchers, and that’s a lot of people I don’t want to let down. I also know that it’s the vocal minority that are the haters... but unfortunately their voices drown everything else out. DA, as a website, seem to care little about fixing many of the issues that would make continued existence here bearable, and overall I have grown weary of a lot of the toxic DA culture that has started to fester lately. On top of all that, I’ve been dealing with my own issues of anxiety, PTSD, and depression... which has not made living here on DA any easier.

In the end, I think this will be the healthiest option for me, though it will undoubtedly depress a lot of my fans. There are some people who only follow me on DA and it’s unfortunate that I have to leave them behind to take care of myself.

Thank you to everyone who has been kind to me here. I have made a lot of good friends on this site over the 11 years I’ve been active here. I hope still to someday meet some of you at conventions in the future too! I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in that time, and it most definitely has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, hasn’t it? Thank you all for your support. Even if you’ve never spoken up before, I could still see you supported my work through favorites and reblogs.

Who knows, maybe someday down the road if DA decides to change some of their policies and the toxicity levels decrease, maybe I’ll return? It’s doubtful, but I do try to look on the positive side.

Anyway... Thank you everyone for supporting me, for helping make SYAC into a thing, for enjoying my Alex Ze Pirate comics, and for just being awesome and amazing fans over the years.

Goodbye.

-Andrew Dobson (aka: Tom Preston)
Presiona para expandir...
 
Like any standard pussy- Dobson always runs from a challenge. Even if doing so would eliminate one of the only places people still see his art.
 
Smokey dijo:
He could stop uploading to Deviantart, and just direct people to his website so that at least he would be getting something every time people looked at his artwork.
Presiona para expandir...

IIRC, he tried to do that before this Patreon business started. For a time he only uploaded part of the image and you had to visit his website to see the entire thing. I don't remember if there were ads, but he certainly pestered everybody to CLICK THE FLATTR BUTTON which apparently was some kind of way to give money to him. The problem was that nobody went and clicked. We'll see what happens now that he's leaving Deviantart. Will anyone follow this time? So far his thousands of Deviantart followers have been exceptionally lazy to do anything other than saying "but we looove you" which Dobby promptly ignores.
 
Última edición:
You know what the really funny thing is? Like the really hilarious thing?

He could have gotten similar results by getting off of twitter for once.

(and art is a "waste of time without compensation?" wow, dick. It's not only the mark of someone who doesn't like to create but also sounds like someone with no concept of generosity at all.

Hell, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's done things just for people without compensation, perhaps even exclusively to them for one reason of another because, hey, I'm not a good artist but I'm sure the other guy can look and think "oh hey, this person took an hour or more out of their day solely to give me something. How nice of them!"

I'm willing to bet Dobby has never, ever done anything like that.)
 
Is he really going to go-go? Say that it's so-so!

At the end of LOTR, when Gandalf cries one tear as the tower falls...That is myself at this very moment...
 
Estado
No está abierto para más respuestas.
Atrás
Top Abajo