Sweet Peach Creations

You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow, we're always doing it wrong?

You have to be thin, but not too thin, and you can never say you wanna be thin. You have to say you wanna be healthy, but also, you have to BE THIN.

You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass.

You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.

You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.

You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time.

You have to be a career woman, but also, always be looking out for other people.

You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is INSANE, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining!

You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood, but ALWAYS STAND OUT and ALWAYS BE GRATEFUL. But never forget that the system is rigged, so find a way to acknowledge that but ALSO, always be grateful!

You have to never get old. Never be rude. Never show off. Never be selfish. Never fall down. Never fail. Never show fear. Never get OUT OF LINE. It's too hard! It's too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says 'thank you!' And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also, everything is your fault.

I'm just so tired of watching myself, and every single other woman tie herself into knots, so that people will like us.

And if all of that, is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don't even know." -Gloria the barbie movie

Here’s the deal. I am an artist. Most people realize that this is a hard career to choose, but few realize HOW hard. Most of my income, thankfully I am currently able to live at home, comes from commissions from online users. I don’t have to pay for my living expenses currently, but that doesn’t make me happy. I want to be out, away from home, with a job that can sustain me, and my pets. Unfortunately, despite having applied to over 50 places in the last two years, I have not gotten hired by a single one, and I have had only 10 interviews, and no call backs after that. I don’t know why, but apparently, I am UN-Hire-able.

Anyways, since no one will hire me, and extra income, for social events, movies, trips, etc, has to be earned through my commissions, and websites like Redbubble. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do get requests, but my business has been fairly slow as of December, due to my laptop not working well enough to do digital work. Any and all work had to be done by old fashioned art styles. Which, becomes very expensive when you factor in supplies. And these commissions are pretty much the only way I get any real pay out of my work.

This is a craft. I craft I have been honing for close to 20 years. Like any other worker, it isn’t something that is just done. an average piece, just line art, takes me a MINIMUM of one hour to create. That does not include research, details, shading, or doing a final piece that has full color, or is done digitally. A piece can take weeks to fit together properly. And it becomes very discouraging when people don’t want to spend money on this labor.

As an artist, we are sometimes forced to make very tough decisions on pricing. People don’t want to spend money on what we have been working on our abilities our whole lives. When a person won’t spend even 20 bucks on our time, even when we should be charging at minimum, 30 dollars an hour for our time, we can feel like there is no point in even trying.

So, we go to sites like Redbubble and others, hoping, hoping HOPING, that maybe, just maybe, putting our work there will help us to gain a fanbase, and to be able to live life worth living. But people don’t buy our stuff.

When we put our work on these sites, we get a FRACTION of the profit. You are paying around 30 dollars total including shipping for a piece? We get around five bucks of that, FIVE. MEASLY. BUCKS. A product we spend hours slaving over, stressing over, getting harassment and critique over. And we don’t even get the majority of the profit. And to make it even more aggravating, we don’t even see any money in our hands until we have made 100 dollars out of that meager percentage we get. And if someone cancels an order, we get money out of our percentage taken away. And that is without raising the prices they set when you start submitting.

When you go to the doctor, a lawyer, the dentist, you are willing to pay what is a proper amount, because you understand that these skills take time, money, and EFFORT to use. Well, why is it, that you won’t pay an artist what they are due?

Well, you say, art isn’t really something that needs that high of a price paid, it isn’t really important to a person’s health. Let me tell you, you will notice if art goes away. Art is the package your toothpaste came in. Art is the music you listen to. Art is the shoes you wear, the food you buy, and the building you live in. You will know if art is gone.

And don’t get me wrong, I understand that many people simply can’t always afford to buy stuff from an artist. But, artists can’t afford to do it either. And guess what? They do it anyway. Because they understand that struggle. It is the same as buying local, you want the person who has made your life better to get what they deserve for their craft.

John Boyega visiting children at The Royal Hospital in London.

So a year ago, a grand portion of my ‘Disney Animals as Humans’ series from 2012 - 2014 was featured across a handful of media outlets to be met by varying degrees of praise and criticism. Over the course of that strange 2-week run, I’ve accumulated so many wonderful followers - from all different walks of life, no less - who had come to let me know what the diversity implemented in those drawings meant to them personally. My goal with this series was, and still is, to abolish this myth that you need to destroy a character design’s integrity in order to diversify and expand your horizons. That a character can still retain their personality and spirit regardless of what race or ethnic background you assign to them. That “humanizing” any anthropomorphic character as anything but white is somehow inaccurate or takes away from source material as though there were anything set in stone on the blank slates of a story set in contemporary NY or under the sea. So with that out of the way - let me clarify what I’ve done here:

 Dodger is brown. He’s probably Desi or Latino - I didn’t have anything in mind, just that I doubt Rita and Tito should be the only “minorities” just because they’re brown-coded characters. This is NY. C’mon.

Sebastian is Caribbean and this is entirely canon.

Chicano Lady and Tramp. I thought it suited the narrative well enough.

This one is self-explanatory.