Imagine you had just accomplished a big artistic goal. One you’ve looked forward to for months.

It could be getting your first commission. Or your hundredth. Maybe you’ve grown to a thousand followers.

Then ask yourself, “now what? Why did I work so hard for this?”

If you come up blank, it might be because you’ve been on auto-pilot, or acting according to expectation.

Are you reaching effectively for your goals? Get there with 3 quick exercises and achieve more. Click To Tweet

And there are a lot of expectations in the NSFW art field. From taking commissions to earning as many followers as possible, we seldom stop to consider what we really want out of our NSFW art.

Shifting from short-term to long-term

I started freelancing back in 2017. For a few years, I priced comfortably from $6-$70, believing people wouldn’t pay for anything over a hundred bucks. The short-term validation was a drug, helping me avoid setting difficult long-term goals.

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That changed two years ago. I had just joined a $400 accounting course, and I wanted to pay my mom back. I was doing $70 an illustration (or even less), and it felt impossible to reach $400.

I was so desperate, I read through a money self-help book. You know, the kind that tells you to just believe in yourself, and money will come. It didn’t help.

But looking past the attractive short-term goals did.

I knew I needed to add more value to my art, come up with new strategies, and start taking risks. I showed my expertise, built my blog and audience, and slowly increased my price as I increased my value, up to $400 a fully-rendered illustration. It feels odd thinking back to the anxiety I felt that day, wondering if I’d ever charge more than a hundred dollars.

The lesson? Revisit your goals and see if you’re really moving forward, or stuck on auto-pilot. Here are some actionable techniques I recommend:

1. Find out what your inspirations are up to

It’s hard to set goals when you don’t know what to aim for. I recommend studying the artists you look up to. What projects are they working on? How are they building their audience?

For example, I’ve recently started HBeats99 to focus on my own OCs and stories, similar to Gats’s Amagato Cafe.

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Action point: List down three creators you look up to, and find out what they’re doing. See how you can create similar projects or goals.

Think big and work backwards

You can fast track your growth by setting a goal that seems impossible, then figuring out how to make it possible with smaller steps.

My big goal is to make a livable income from my NSFW art and writing. To achieve that, I’m:

• Building different sources of income
• Working with others to create content faster
• Minimizing my risk of being banned

If my big goal had been to ‘raise my prices’, I wouldn’t have thought of those other solutions.

Action point: What are your current goals? Write them down, then think about what each goal is meant to help you accomplish. For example, “earn more patrons” could be “earn full-time income from my art”. Then for each big goal, think of other ways to reach it.

Revisit what you thought was impossible

Do you know the story of the elephant and the rope? A tiny knot can hold an elephant in place, as long as the elephant believes it can’t move. The same applies to our beliefs.

Limiting beliefs take the form of “I can’t ___ because ____”.

• I can’t improve because I don’t have time to draw
• I can’t grow my audience because my art is bad
• I can’t earn money because I don’t know how to market myself

In my case, I used to believe I couldn’t do hentai CG art because I couldn’t draw guys. Wrong! Even if my guys aren’t perfect, I can problem-solve and use tools like model posers to help me.

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Action Point: If you’re serious about reaching your goals, you’ll need to take time and break down your beliefs. It helps to ask “is this actually true? Even if it is, how can I treat this as a problem, rather than unavoidable?” Write down the self-beliefs you have, and see what you can do to treat them as problems to break down.

Conclusion

The NSFW art path is full of doubt, but it’s ultimately what we love doing. As you revisit your goals, apply the three exercises above to see if you’re on auto-pilot, or moving forward with purpose:

1. Study your inspirations and their strategies
2. Aim for a big goal by accomplishing many small goals
3. Impossible might not be, so keep your beliefs in check.

I hope the article helped you. What goals do you have, and how are you planning to revisit them? Feel free to comment below, or join the NSFW Artists Guild server and share!

Cheers, Beats.