Feelin’ New & Improved! New Drop!
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Greetings from your friendly neighborhood internet artist! 👋
This one’s all about Teknakolor! I’ve been spending a lot of time revamping the entire website into a dedicated store where I release new products consistently. Additionally, I dropped a brand new set of sexy Tron Bonne and Servbot merch, which is available now!
Servbots can definitely be useful…
It’s only the beginning in a new line of heat that I’m dropping this chilly Holiday season and moving onward into 2025. My time is currently split between working on the remainder of the Syrup Mixbook content and brand new pinup art products on Teknakolor weekly.
After being on hiatus for majority of this year, it feels really good to get back on the creative swing again. So I’ve been prepping lots of goodies to drop there. Overall, I have a lot of plans in store for the site and brand’s longevity as a whole, which I’ll get into a bit…
Teknakolor’s Aim
Since I’m no longer representing myself on social media, I wanted to have a spot where my pinup work can be found separately from my main art site. I’m no longer concerned with having a separate SFW and NSFW presence or accounts online. While yes, I’m too old to be worried about being judged for drawing risqué stuff (especially considering everyone is openly a freak nowadays), I still wanted to keep my subject matter split for logistical reasons. Teknakolor provides this for me as that primary goal.
At first, like Crimson before it, I wanted the platform to be a standalone “Patreon” where I cut out that specific type of pestering corpo middleman taking cuts of the money patrons give creators. Which was good at first. However, I had a few issues and epiphanies regarding sharing my art as digital “pay-for-post” content versus transmuting it into a physical commodity I can live off of in a healthy manner. After all, I’ve been sharing my art for free online since 2005, so I had no issue with that per se.
But over time, demand for my art quickly kept increasing and it became genuinely impossible to maintain both the larger audience who stayed on my social accounts expecting the free art, and the smaller amount of paying patrons expecting the paid art. Again, I’m grossly independent— meaning everything I do is done solo dolo. (Like a Kid Cudi song.) The marketing, I do alone. The site design and implementing, I do alone. Business planning and the meat of it all: the art, I do alone. Throw in a few random boss encounters in life since 2020 and it was a perfect storm for a creative burnout. I had to take some minor Ls, otherwise keeping up with dubs would’ve resulted in a major one. So, I feel my choice to stop sharing art online has been publicly misconstrued for that reason. Like, no… I’m not selfish… I’m just one dude…
That’s where Teknakolor comes in again (pause): where that initial “Art Patreon-style” plan failed, I converted it to a standalone store to run merch tests on since early 2023. And I've been keeping it as one of my pinch hitters since.
Teknakolor’s Main Benefits
No more pesky online skepticism or having to prove I’m not a con artist.
Reviews! Primarily, it’s just as simple for me to upload a new product and have it listed as it is for customers to buy it and have it fulfilled and sent out instantly to them. Importantly, there’s a store review section listed beneath every product where customers have written reviews on the quality of their purchases. Which is very important for me from both a feedback standpoint and, because in the past, many were skeptical about how I moved selling my art. Like, sorry to disappoint ‘em, but I’m not a drug dealer, just an art one… I never really used review systems in my stores prior, because I just didn’t bother to. I’ve always been rather credulous focusing on the good of people. But the more I’ve grown in my success and popularity, I realized how important it is to visibly defend myself from harmful naysayers and ill-intentioned people spreading misinformation about me.
So! I’m very ecstatic to have that integrated, and I’m certain it’ll make future customers feel at ease purchasing from me. They are automatically notified via email to optionally review the product 2 weeks after receiving it.
There’s now a Calendar that showcases upcoming and past drops with a link to information about each specific product. All merchandise released has an active duration. Whether it surpasses the allotment I set to sell or to make room for new stuff in the catalog, anyone can be notified on what’s available or not by simply checking that calendar regularly. I’m very much looking forward to filling the calendar out with some more pretty ladies! It’ll almost look like a mini-character select screen, haha.
Teknakolor has its own newsletter for the explicit purpose of announcing new drops (and not my wordy blogposts that are about my overall experience being an artist for a living like this one). So, if you’re interested in pinup goodies, be sure to sign up! Make sure you also keep it from going in your spam folder.
I’m also gradually expanding the kinds of products I’ll be selling on here. I’ve now introduced Magnets for people who don’t know where to stick their stickers; at least they now have an option for a reusable variant. Downside, you can only use a metal surface. Pros and cons to everything!
In the near future, I’ll be dropping original apparel featuring my own characters and short-form doujin artbooks and comics. They’ll also be on-demand ordering so you (and I) won’t have to worry about preordering ever again. But you’re going to have sign up to keep track of all that stuff I’ll be adding, so make sure you do!
Teknakolor as a Brand?
In the future, I do want the place to not only be a spot to showcase and sell my merch, but also one where I can host, feature, and sell other pin-up and erotic artists’ merch that are aligned with the level and quality of my own art. And I'd honestly take zero cut as I have my own work to feed me, in lieu of strengthening the brand as a collective of likeminded creators making hot stuff. Despite whatever is said about me, I’ve always been a patron of the arts myself, and supported other artists and creators financially my entire time being around. But again, it has to be the right kind of people behind their pens for that specific dream to work.
Egregious Interactive, which you may have seen at the bottom, is the name of my actual overarching brand. I picked the term "egregious" because its definition is an archaic oxymoron. I felt drawn to it as my own art, which has been praised often for being good, can also attract a lot of bad energy… for some unexplainable universal reason, lol. I intend on using it to publish quality physical works, and I’m using my own art as the guinea pig, so to speak. My first Mixbook, Syrup, will be the first to be branded as such. (Yes, I'm slowly building a third site that will house the overall structure of the brand.)
I’ve been called the entire thesaurus definition before...
I feel extremely confident after selling products online for the past several years, so it’s about time to start taking on new side quests. Overall, my ultimate goal is still to have a means to fund my own games, as we live in a society of capitalism. Gotta be able to pay people to help get things like that made, so that overarching mission hasn’t changed at all for me.
And with that, I think I should wrap this up and get back to work! Again, remember to subscribe to the Teknakolor newsletter for products getting announced if that tickles your fancy. I’m absolutely itchin’ to drop some fresh & juicy winter-themed content for this holiday season…😤
Happy Holidays to everyone! ✨🌟✨
