Hey everyone. Lune here.

Buckle up cuz this one's going to be a bit rambling, I'm sure.

Less business, more stream of consciousness. I'm going through in edits now and bolding the key points for the sake of everyone with my brand of adhd and brain fuzz. There's art at the end, I promise. I won't be upset if you skip to the bottom.

I mentioned this in my shop update email last month but I want to give you an explanation. I'm pulling back from markets for the rest of the year. Maybe forever. I might replace it with another type of business model, I might just go back to being a hobbyist. I don't know yet. We'll see.

I've always been an artist, but I never intended it to be my job. I started this in 2020, when everyone was reconsidering all their life plans. I was fresh out of school, overwhelmed with decisions and sick with stress. I promised myself I'd do this for five years, just to see how far I could take it, and at the end of that period I'd have a hard conversation with myself about my career. This had to be financially viable, and I had to enjoy my relationship with my art when it was my source of income, and if those two things were true then I would stick with it long term. The most important factor in my career, for me personally, is that it leaves me the time and energy and resources to pursue my creative passions. Building my career around that process seemed like a reasonable place to start.

I do love this job. It's a dream. It's a very time consuming, very vulnerable, very taxing, very low paying dream. I'm really really really proud of what I've built Lunearch Art into. I'm really proud of the art I've made and the friendships I've formed and the hours I've put in. And, in the middle of August I crunched some numbers and realized I'd actually have a lot more time and energy for actually pursuing the art I want to do if I quit this all entirely and got a full time day job. The admin work, customer service, the marketing- that was what was filling my work week. And that's not the kind of thing you can forget once you've figured it out.

I didn't want to make any decisions until after Comic Con. That was the first weekend of September. Comic Con was fun! It was a lot more fun than I usually have at events. The people watching was a blast. I made some friends. I got some stickers. And at the end of the weekend, it was a lot less money than I usually make from three days of sales. I hate for sales to be the focus of my art, but this is my career we're talking about. Realizing that that change of venue and audience wasn't the magic bullet that made this financially viable, that was demoralizing as hell.

After Comic Con I felt completely burnt out. I was depressed. I was so overwhelmed with the idea of going to markets, preparing inventory, doing customer service. I thought I had my dream job and I was starting to dread it. I couldn't face the rest of the year like that. I spent the month talking with my loved ones, friends and family, other artists and coworkers at my day job. In the end it was pretty apparent that doing markets wasn't viable for me anymore. It wasn't worth the effect it was having on me.

So I'm out!

I promised myself I'd dedicate myself to art for 5 years. We're right about at the end of year 4 now. So what comes next?

I can just barely live off of my part time day job, so for the rest of the year that's what I'm doing. My website/shop is staying up, and I intend to keep the newsletter going, but I'm not doing anything else for the business right now. This time is for me, for resting and healing and making the things that catch my fancy. Making things for fun.

I'm not good at taking breaks, so I'm not allowing myself to do work here (besides shipping my very occasional online orders) until 2025. At that point we'll play it by ear, but I'm not going to force myself to start looking at long term plans again until at least this time next year.

I want to finish my tarot deck, and possibly Kickstart a print run of it. I want to finish the crochet blanket that I've been picking away at for three years. I want to finish my fancy ball joint doll, which has been even longer in the making. I want to get involved in my old fire-dance group, get more active, learn to dance again. None of these are projects that I felt I could really spare the time for with work hanging over my head.

The day after I decided to pull back, I started writing. I haven't done creative writing really since high school, but I have a sort of fantasy setting I've been playing around with since then, and I finally started committing it to the page. It's been a ton of fun recording things, ironing out all the little inconsistencies and filling in the gaps. It's a lot easier to see what I have when it's on the page and not all juggled in my head. I have almost 40 pages now. It's rough, borderline academic, more like encyclopedia entries than a novel. It's the most fun I've had in months and months and months. I haven't decided when, or if, I'll share it with everyone. If I do it'll probably be in smaller pieces, or once I've decided what medium I want the final form to be. Or maybe you'll all demand to see it and I'll finally figure out how Shopify's blog features work so I can host it right on my own website. I don't know. But I want you to know that I'm having fun. I'm playing with mediums that I never got comfortable with. I'm making art that I never expected from myself.

I'm sleeping in and taking walks in the sun and I'm crying a lot but it feels so much less desperate than the crying I did before. Less fear. Less grief, too. If I'm mourning, it's for the version of me who didn't think they were allowed to take a real break. It's for the years that lead me to be shocked that anyone would support me resting. That everyone would support me resting.

I really expected someone to play devil's advocate but everyone I've shared this with has been so supportive and so kind and so proud of me for taking care of myself. That's been so surprising. Scary, almost. I thought I was getting good at being nice to myself, but I think I was actually just getting good at living up to my own high expectations, and it's frightening to realize those aren't the same thing. I have so much love and gratitude for everyone who's helping me learn the difference.

I have so much love for the couple of you who reached out after my last email to support me and wish me well. Thank you.

The other art piece for September, the one I'm actually ready to share, is my Three of Cups!

I'd been trying to start this piece for weeks and weeks, never quite happy with it, never quite capturing the energy I was looking for. It was the first and biggest sign that I was making the right choice with my life, because as soon as all this stress was cut away, I sat back down and started over and perfectly captured the energy I wanted for this piece. It just flowed. It was beautiful. I have a speedpaint video also, if you're interested in the process, and a little peek at what I was working with before.

It's starting to be more fun to make these videos. I'm figuring out tricks to make the process simpler. I'm starting to see it as its own art.

I don't really know what the future holds right now, but I feel at peace with it. I hope you'll stick around. I understand if you don't. This isn't quite what you signed up for. But I'm still going to make art, and I'm still going to share it with the world, and I'd love for you to be part of that.

As always, here's a little discount code for my shop. Might as well. I've been averaging about one online sale every 2 months, this year. It's not like it'll take too much out of me to keep that available.

thank you for reading.