I vaguely remember making a “new year resolution” of some sort at the end of 2024, spurred from my feeling unaccomplished and hating my day job so much that I wanted to quit – but I couldn’t quit, because I have a lot of financial commitments (rent, loans, bills, saving for a house, etc.).

That resolution was to “start an art business” so that I can eventually quit the corporate life, and live on my own terms. I don’t think I made much progress in the “business” aspect… I think this post would be a great opportunity for me to reflect on the things that happened, and plan better for the next year.

Highlights

Anyway, let’s look at some monthly highlights for the year!

January

• Uploaded a vlog on Youtube.
• Created or revived my art social media accounts.
• Started research on how to sell my art (Booth.pm, AliBaba, Upwork, Amazon KDP, Etsy, Printify).
• Applied for jobs at game companies (Capcom, HAL labs) but got rejected at the screening stage.

February

• Attended Comitia for the first time.

March

• Got sick with Covid.
• Attended Urban Sketchers meetup for the first time.
• Visited a children’s book printing factory.
• Joined a paywalled online artist community.
• Attended a workshop for creating comics.
• Attended Tama Comi for the first time.

April

• Submitted an illustration for Clip Studio Paint’s illustration contest.
• Started work on my submission for local art group’s Steampunk-themed illustration and comic book.

May

• Uploaded another vlog on Youtube.
• Bought an online business course (for my art business)

June

• Attended SCBWI Tokyo meetup for the first time.

July

• Created social media accounts for a separate personal brand (which ended up being unused).
• Setup my Etsy store.
• Sold a couple prints to a Redditor.

August

• Uploaded my first short-form vlog on Youtube.
• Made my first (and only) sale on my Etsy store.

September

• Visited a mental clinic for the first time in my life.
• Ordered my first batch of business cards.
• Published my personal online store.
• Tabled at an artist alley (Tama Comi) for the first time.

October

• Started work on my 2nd submission for local art group’s fantasy-themed comic book.

November

• Created social media accounts and published the website for my local art group.
• Attended Design Festa for the first time.
• Attended Comitia with my local art group members.

December

• Started programming for a game pet project.

Looking back…

Looking at the highlights, I think I did okay for the year.

In September, I decided to visit a mental clinic and officially got diagnosed with depression. It’s not really a surprise, considering that my mental health has been on a slow decline in the past decade. It’s nice to finally confirm my suspicions and get medication for it. My mood and concentration has improved a lot ever since I started taking medication.

My main goal for the year was to “start an art business”. So, did I achieve that? Technically, yes! Because I was given the opportunity to share a booth with a friend at Tama Comi, and from there, I managed to make a few sales of the prints and stickers that I made. It was the first time I actually had something resembling a “shop” in real life, so the experience was pretty surreal. Here’s to hoping that I can do more of “selling something” in 2026.

As part of the process of figuring out what my “art business” would consist of, I planned to start a Youtube channel that documents my journey (in the form of vlogs). I managed to publish a few videos, but I eventually stopped in late August. The main reason was that, Youtube videos in itself was pretty time-consuming – I would rather spend whatever little time I have (after my day job) drawing instead of making videos.

Looking forward…

After a year of trying to kickstart my art business journey and experiencing new things, I think I have a better idea of what I want and am capable of doing. Throughout the year, I had to repeatedly ask myself questions like:

• What is my definition of “success” in life, without comparing with others?
• How much am I willing to sacrifice to achieve that “success”?
• What is stopping me from chasing that “success”?

I’ll explore my thoughts and try to answer the questions above in a separate blog… I’ll close today’s post with my list of new year resolutions:

• Illustrate a new picture every week
• Create a one-shot comic every 3 months
• Sell prints, stickers and comics at an artist alley (Tama Comi or Comitia, or something)

See you guys in 2026!

Before that, Etsy

At the very beginning, I actually opened my first online store on Etsy. Etsy makes it really easy to create a store, add merchandise, and access a large pool of customers on the platform. It costs 0.20 USD to list an item on sale for 4 months, which is relatively cheap if you can make consistent sales.

I was able to set up an Etsy store and publish it within a couple days – which is perfect if you already have a solid business. In my case, I opened my store with 5 different prints, and eventually grew to 11. My store items got a few dozen views in the first few weeks, but eventually dropped to zero after the first month.

I did get my first (and only sale, as of writing) on Etsy though! A customer from Spain bought one print. I was happy to get that sale, but after checking out the details, I was a little horrified (for the customer). The print itself was 10 USD. The shipping was 5 USD. That’s what I set as the bare minimum for my items.

What I didn’t expect was that the customer had to pay additional fees on top of the 15 USD, bringing it up to 18.15 USD. And after that, Etsy takes some cuts for various fees, which ended up with me receiving the final profit of 12.39 USD.

The main reason that I considered creating another store outside Etsy was the shipping. If you bought 5 different prints from my Etsy store, you’d get charged the 5 USD shipping fee 5 times.

It makes more sense to only charge the shipping once if you purchase multiple items from a single store. Or, have a “free shipping for purchases above X dollars”. Unfortunately, such features were not available (as far as I know).

On top of that, Etsy is a marketplace rather than a website builder – so you couldn’t customize the layout or style of your Etsy store as much.

And then, Shopify

The next service I considered using was Shopify. Unlike Etsy, Shopify is more of a website builder that comes with a checkout system. You don’t pay for listing items on your Shopify store, but rather for the service subscription itself – about 30 USD (I think) per month.

The monthly subscription model was too much for me. I didn’t want to pay a 30 USD subscription when I don’t even know if I can make that much money each month. Some people might say, “if your business grows, the 30 USD subscription won’t feel like much” – and I agree to that. But honestly, I’m still not confident about my art business yet. I really hope I will grow out of this in the next year…

And thus, Laksapedia

Anyway, since I know web development, I figured I could develop my own online store. I also needed the programming practice, since my current job hasn’t presented me any challenging opportunities in the past year. The idea was that I could save money, gain some experience, and add this online store project as an achievement in my job CV.

Sure, my store won’t have all the convenient tools like SEO optimizations or customer tracking or user-friendly dashboard like Etsy or Shopify does, but at least it only costs about 4 USD per month to host my own store on my own server. I have full control over my own server so I can do whatever I want to it.

The Bumpy Journey

I have to admit – it was not a practical idea to create my own online store from scratch. It was time consuming to write code and figure out stuff like databases, server hosting, REST APIs and writing HTML/CSS for the UI. I imagine it would take a longer time if I didn’t have programming experience.

But it was enjoyable. It’s over a decade since I wrote my own website from scratch for a real-life purpose. I’ve only ever contributed small chunks of code for enterprise web applications, which tend to already have a mature architecture written by someone else.

There were some hiccups along the way, like deciding how to implement a simple shopping cart system, or how to use the PayPal payment button API, but I managed to figure them out in the end.

I also had several moments of “scope creep”, where I start adding more features outside of what was planned because “it will be useful in the future”. I eventually managed to stop myself from going too far, and set a cut-off point for releasing my online store. I’m pretty proud of that too.

Closing

When I finished the bare-minimum version – or as some would call an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – of my online store, and published it on my own web server… I felt a great sense of accomplishment. I know it’s a transient feeling, but the result is somewhat permanent. I will be using my own online store for as long as it makes sense to, so I don’t think it was (too much) wasted effort.

My online store is still missing a lot of features that mature services like Etsy or Shopify have, but I’m proud of what I created. I hope it’ll serve its purpose while I try to grow my art business. Even if it doesn’t, I’m actually pretty happy that I managed to finish a project as big as this.

Anyway, if you’re interested to buy some of my stuff, do head over to the Shop!

I initially used AI to help me write the code. As I tried to add more features, Claude started hallucinating and giving me incorrect code snippets, so I decided to write the code the old-fashioned way. Thanks to the template script written by AI, I didn’t have to waste time writing boilerplate code – I just dove into the existing code and added features along the way, with the help of the AutoHotKey documentation.

It’s good to know that I still haven’t lost my touch in programming. My current job doesn’t really have a good engineering culture, so I started to pick up a lot of bad corporate habits (like writing garbage code and focusing on “solution design” instead of writing maintainable code). I’m glad I still haven’t lost interest in programming completely. However, I need to take my art business more seriously.

I hope this little app would be helpful for people to keep track of their app usage on their Windows desktop. You can find the source code and downloadable .exe file here: https://github.com/laxa88/time-tracker

Today, I’d like to talk about my recent journey in trying to start an art business.

Retrospective

Since early last year, I’ve been thinking about starting an art business as a side hustle. After procrastinating for too long, I finally broke my hiatus with my first illustration on August 2024. Before I could even think of starting an art business, I had to at least try to get in the habit of drawing again.

In building an art business, I figured I had to build a personal brand. I started drawing regular gag comic strips on September 2024, featuring myself and my wife. I planned to draw about 3 times a week. However, after about 2 months of trying to draw regular comic strips, I discovered a few hurdles and eventually decided to stop.

First, I was constantly worried about running out of ideas. Second, I wasn’t sure how to monetize my comics. Third, I found it cost-ineffective in terms of the effort spent. The visual quality of comics are generally not important – The punchline matters more. Take xkcd for example, Randall Munroe’s strips are often very clever, and requires minimal effort on the visuals to get the message across.

There is also plenty of competition on places like Reddit’s r/comics or Webtoons. As far as I know, only the top artists are able to make any sort of revenue from their work. Knowing myself, I want to maintain a high level of art quality. I couldn’t maintain a satisactory level of art while writing a consistent stream of scheduled jokes. I pretty much burned out within the 2nd month or so.

I’m realistic about my circumstances. I’m approaching my 40’s. I intend to start a family in the next couple years. I have mortgages to pay. I don’t have the luxury of time or stamina on my side. I have to be careful with how I approach building my side hustle. This means that I have to think of ways to provide the most value with as little time as I can afford.

I am now aware that I cannot make comics by myself and hope that people will pay for it. There’s a steep up-front investment before I can validate if my comics can even make any profit. I would probably need at least a hundred comic strips before I can compile them into a book for sale. If I drew 3 comic strips a week, that would mean I need to consistently draw for 30 weeks (about 8 months) before I can even start printing them and pray that it sells. Of course, if I have a large-enough fanbase, I can probably sell a decent amount of copies of the compilation books, but I don’t think I want to invest that much time into it to find out.

Ultimately, I like drawing comic strips but I didn’t want to build my personal brand around comics strips, especially since I don’t think I can continuously write jokes for longer than a few months. it didn’t seem like a scalable idea for an art business too.

Planning

So, given that I will have less time and energy in the near future, what else can I do to start and grow an art business?

I came across an exercise commonly taught by entrepreneurs, a business-oriented version of the Japanese Ikigai chart. I drew a Venn Diagram of “things I am good at”, “things that I love”, and “things people will pay for”. The intersection of all three of the circles would be the best choice for a business idea that, in theory, would be most suited for me to pursue in the long term.

With the help of the Venn Diagram exercise, I settled with “creating illustrations and teaching art” and dropped other things like “freelance programming”, “gamedev” and “teaching Japanese”.

Then I asked myself, if I could make a decent living doing what I loved, what would my daily work routine be like? My answer was to “create cute illustrations”. Hopefully this can eventually expand to related things like “teaching how to draw cute characters” and “publishing children’s books”.

Next, I aligned my interests with some viable ideas that are relatively easy to execute. I defined “easy” as products that will not take longer than a week to finish, if I did it full-time. That meant no book compilations or gamedev projects, because those would take at least 3 months of full time work. A couple of internet strangers have expressed interest in buying my recent illustration as prints – this could be a hint toward how I start making some money as a business. I could regularly create simple illustrations that can be sold as prints. And once I have a consistent catalogue of illustrations online, I can try looking for commission or freelance gigs.

I also came across the Value Ladder exercise, where I tried to determine what kind products or services I can sell at different price tiers.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that people will organically discover my art and buy them, so my next challenge is to figure out how to get potential customers to discover my artwork. I believe this is called “generating leads” in business. I suppose I could build an audience with a Youtube channel. I’m still uncertain about how I should approach that for now.

Anyway, that’s a summary of the things I have done and will do in the near future. Hopefully I’ll stay on track and share some positive results in the next couple months!

My first step is to create Webtoon and Tapas webcomic pages.

Today, I’d like to officially start a new habit – to pursue art actively. To draw actively, daily. To learn new painting skills. To produce works that entertain readers.

In exchange, I’ll have to sacrifice some time. I have to remove social media from my life. Remove the desire to make connections with people. Remove the curiosity in anything non-art related such as games, music, and programming. Forget all the time and effort I have sunken into other aspects of my life that do not contribute to my growth as an artist.

I wonder who I’ll be 5 years later, on 2029-09-09.

My official title is “Web engineer”, or more specifically “Frontend web engineer”. In my previous jobs, I had opportunities to perform my task, which I quite enjoy. I was challenged with technological problems such as writing libraries, resolving issues related to browser inconsistencies, or fixing performance issues with the technologies that we use (for example, ReactJS or Webpack or some other obscure library).

I enjoyed the journey. I liked writing code. I liked refactoring code to make things more performant or maintainable. I liked picking up new libraries or applying new programming techniques. I liked learning new designs and patterns and trying to apply them into my existing projects. My managers and co-workers were clever and equally passionate about the things I pursued, so even when we had disagreements about specific things, we could still agree on the goal (to write good code).

However, in my current job, I have started questioning my career path. All the principles I’ve learned along my career seem to have been thrown out the window. It’s the first time I worked with purely Japanese team members. I started realizing the cultural differences between Japanese and non-Japanese engineers.

Japanese engineers (at least in my company) love to solve problems. And they love to solve it “perfectly”. Perfect as in, having tons of meetings to decide on the best way to solve a problem rather than using empirical methods (i.e. experimenting with various alternatives before making a decision). I can’t tell if it’s a bad thing, but it has certainly made me lose interest in all the work ethics I’ve carried up until recently.

Code review? Maintainability? Programming patterns? Testing? Experimentation? None of those matter because my Japanese coworkers just want the “best” solutions through discussions and round-table agreements. It doesn’t matter if the code is written terribly, because nobody reads the code until a bug happens. And when a bug is fixed, we celebrate the success of the engineers who solved the problem in a timely manner. It doesn’t matter if we had production bugs 5 times per week, as long as we solved them quickly. We’ll figure out prevention methods when the bugs occur, rather than pre-emptively writing code to handle them. This made me think of the Cloudstrike incident that happened recently.

I personally don’t agree with that. I believe in quality, as in “prevention is better than cure”. I write tests, I write code adhering to as many common or recommended practices as I can think of. I don’t take shortcuts unless absolutely necessary. I write code with maintainability and future-proofing in mind. I don’t necessarily over-optimize, but I’d prefer to put enough thought into the near future before comitting to design choices, because foundations are hard to change the further the project grows. Most of all, I expected my co-workers (who are all seniors, mind you) to hold the same standards in their work.

But that is not the case, I think. Everyone just wants to tackle new interesting problems and solve them quickly, without slowing down to think carefully. After all, the company is a start-up. Move fast and break things, they say. I can’t argue with that. I mean, perhaps they also broke me along the way.

For the past 2 years in my current company, the Japanese expression of “hammering the nail that sticks out” has become a little more evident to me. It’s not necessarily through coercion or harassment. It can be as simple as group-think – If I’m the only person in my team who values code quality, whereas the other 4 or 5 Japanese engineers in my team think that “getting the job done quickly” is all that matters, then I have no choice but to “disagree but commit”. Sure, I could go against the grain and be “That Guy” and push for things to be done “The Right Way”, but that is just not my personality.

Trying to bring this issue up to my managers, they always suggest that I should take leadership by taking gradual steps to convince my team to adopt my way of thinking. It’s easier said than done. I agree that it is definitely possible to make it happen. But that brought me to think of today’s blog title: What is my career motivation?

Is my burning passion to “write good code” and influence everyone around me to agree with me? No, all I want is to do my job in a way I enjoy, the way I believe is best for everyone involved, get paid, get off work on time and cook for my wife, and enjoy the rest of my time with my family. I don’t have the mental energy to play politics and influence people to take sides in “doing the right thing”. Not everyone wants to be a leader and change the world. I’d like to think that I have what it takes to lead (if I work hard enough), but the problem is, I do not want to be a leader in web engineering. That’s not where my passion lies.

I was born with the passion for art and games. I had only taken the path of web engineering because my family was poor and I had to take up a practical job to help with the bills and groceries. Now that I have worked hard enough to emigrate to Japan and earn a decent living, I have started to notice my mental fatigue. I thought I loved programming (I think I still do!) but not in this environment. Not among coworkers who have incompatible work principles.

However, there is no benefit to complaining. I have learned to accept my circumstances as it is now. I know that I have lost the motivation to work. But perhaps it’s only at my current company. It’s probably the environment itself. I’m surrounded by yes-men, Japanese men who REALLY love to have meetings in every possible minute of the day before actually doing any work. Japanese men who, when they actually get down to any actual work, get the job done according to all the specs laid down in the meetings, but never really in a way that respects the work as an art in itself.

It’s ironic, there is this Japanese concept called “shokunin” (artisan), referring to labourers who work almost single-mindedly in the path of perfecting their work. Perhaps it’s a thing of the past which is more associated with traditional or manual labor.

Ah, there’s the problem. I see my day job as an extension of art, even if it’s merely writing code. Web programming is not an art, it’s just a means to an end. If I want to write meaningful code, maybe I should have studied harder and gone into graphics programming or machine-learning. However, I know my limits. I am reasonably disciplined and diligent, but not clever enough. But it doesn’t really matter because that’s not where my passion lies.

I miss my early years where I could code for 5 hours without pause, enjoying every minute of it. Now, I dread just looking at the screen and writing any code for longer than 30 minutes. Where has my motivation gone?

That was a cathartic experience. Writing down all these thoughts in my head helped me feel a little better. Now, I just have to ponder more about what makes my life meaningful.

About a decade ago, I watched a movie “The perks of being a wallflower”, which was adapted from the book of the same title. There was a quote in the movie, “we accept the love we think we deserve”. At the time, I didn’t quite understand the meaning and didn’t bother to Google it. Regardless, I was deeply moved by the scene. The character who said it was in an abusive relationship, and wouldn’t bring themselves to step out of the abuse.

Ten years later (today), I recalled the quote while I was daydreaming at work. I finally took the time do a quick search of people discussing the meaning of the quote. I realized that I am a victim of self-loathing, without realizing it. To paraphrase what I understood from the quote; “We accept (and believe we deserve) the (abusive) love that we receive”.

I was, and am still mostly disappointed with my lack of achievements up until now. What have I been doing in the past decade? All I did was move up my career in web development, which isn’t even what my life dream was. All I did, was chase after the “path with least resistance” toward a “well-paying job” so that I can afford an ever-increasing lifestyle upkeep.

My wife says I’m in a very fortunate position. I earn almost double the average salary of white-collar workers in Japan (although there’s no way for me to verify this). I feel chained to my job though. I do mundane programming tasks for most of the year, get paid good money, then spend it on mortgages and occasional holiday trips. Is this truly living? I think this is a form of self-abuse. I’m sacrificing my dreams, my passion, my sanity, all for the sake of securing a stable lifestyle. I’ve allowed my fear of “job instability” tie me down to a mediocre life.

I think, this is the “love” that I have accepted and come to believe that I “deserve”. I put myself through this soulless routine, a job that I don’t love, and will not love me back. I’ve been indoctrined to believe that I just need to keep working up the career ladder, then one day I’ll reap all the benefits when I retire. Such is the concept of meritocracy that my mother beat into me since childhood.

But if I only enjoy the benefits after I retire, wouldn’t that be too late? A decade ago, I figured I’d become a regional manager or boss by now. I thought my ten years of work would get me somewhere. But no, that’s not how I feel at all today, and I doubt I’ll feel any better 10 years from now, let alone after I retire. And even if I do become a regional manager of a company, I doubt I’ll ever feel happy, because at the end of the day, I’m just helping someone else’s company achieve their dreams.

I remember reading a Tweet (cough I mean, “X post”) along the lines of:

Imagine interviewing a retired software engineer, and asking them what their proudest achievement was. And all they could say was something like “I wrote a little automation script that made my company millions of dollars”. Is that something they would be proud of as a life achievement?

I thought it would be soul-crushing if I made that realization in my golden years. Imagine me saying, “I worked really hard and became a regional manager. What exactly did I do? Well, I managed a team of …” and everything after that is just white noise, because who cares what I did before I retired? None of those would be related to what I was passionate about in my life. That scares me so much, I broke down in tears several times over the past year or two. Working remotely alone in my room can mess with my mental health so much.

Over the past decade, I find myself hating myself more and more. I have allowed the entropy that is life to scare me into staying complacent. I’m not confident that my skills and experience are good enough to break me out of the proverbial rat race. I’ve never understood how entrepreneurs could succeed in the midst of so much uncertainty. I blamed my poor upbringing. I blamed the lack of a financial safety net and lack of freedom from obligations to my family. But that’s a terrible way to think. Blaming doesn’t solve any problems. I did nothing to solve my own problems, so that is all on me.

I want to love myself a little more. I want to start working on my actual dreams. I’ll endeavour to be kinder to myself and allow myself to pursue my dreams. I’ll accept that the unnerving feelings due to life uncertainties are a normal part of life. I’ll learn to be better.

In the past 5 years, I saw AI technologies emerge suddenly. I’m not particularly concerned about whether AI will replace my skills as an illustrator or programmer. My art and codebase aren’t that good anyway. :P I’m more worried about how my website will be scraped by AI technology and used without my permission. However, I’m also a little bothered by how many groups (Facebook, Twitter) who are now posting AI illustrations on a regular basis. It’s really easy to tell when the images all have very similar style and are uncredited. However, it’s still depressing to see how widespread AI-related content is being posted online.

Oh, speaking of Twitter, it’s called “X” now? I feel bad for deadnaming the website, but I really loved Twitter for what it was. The iconic blue bird, the unique name and well-moderated community… Now it’s just filled with bots and vocal extremists. It’s a little sad, but things change, and I have to embrace that.

A lot of big events happened too. Just yesterday, there’s something happening with the world economy. Something about Japan and “carry trade” causing a huge market plummet. There’s also the near-assassination of a certain politician. The world is going nuts. Or perhaps it has always been nuts; The internet just made such news more accessible.

I also notice that there are less Japanese artists online nowadays. New ones sprang up, but older ones have somehow disappeared. In fact, one of my Japanese artist friend (the only friend I personally know, sadly) has removed all their online presence. Twitter, Pixiv and a few other Japan-only accounts were completely deactivated. It could be to remove their art from being used for AI art generation. Or maybe it’s because online piracy has gotten so rampant, they’ve given up on posting online. They won’t even reply to my messages on LINE. It could be personal circumstances, but whatever the case, it’s sad to see that good people are just disappearing from the internet.

Now that I think about it, I sort of disappeared from the internet too, right? The only recent things you can find about me are this website, and my sporadic Twitter posts. My Tumblr, DeviantArt, Instagram, Pinterest and every other account have been left untouched for months, if not years.

None of my old internet friends keep in touch with me anymore. I tried reaching out to a few people, but they either ghosted me or were uninterested in holding a conversation. Perhaps, some things are best left as a good memory of the past.

In an attempt to get out of my seclusion, I started attending local indie game meetups. I even briefly talked with the creator of Anodyne, who is a very cool guy! There were so many amazing people there, with their decades of expertise in game, art and design. Some younger, some older than me. It made me realize that my past 5, or 10 years, have been mediocre at best. Underwhelming. I certainly am not the person my younger self hoped to be. I’m a embarassed. What happened to me?

Anyway, self-pity won’t do any good for me. The kind people I met at the indie game meetup have mostly encouraged me to restart something about my hobbies. Gamedev, comics, illustration, anything. Perhaps I’ll try that. I hope to have more positive things to write in my next blog post. Until then!