A page turning…
A new chapter beginning. Finally, after years of recovering from lack of confidence, lack of funds, and lack of time, I’m launching an ‘official’ marketplace for my art. I hope it finds the current in the choppy waters of this world right now. I hope it builds into something I can build into a real business for the later years of my life. I know my body, no matter how well I take care of it, cannot keep up the labor I’ve been putting it through since my twenties.
My real downfall is in the confidence area. In other work, I’m keenly aware of what is efficient and in demand. With my own work, I’ve always felt it was such a distraction. My parents saw being artistic, desiring to be creative, as flaky and unrealistic. I never thought anyone really ‘felt’ my work. That it was valueless. It made good gifts, good tips for sushi and coffee. Maybe I’m still undervaluing my creativity. I’m not completely sure. If you think I’m not charging enough, just throw what you think it’s worth in the tip jar. I just know I… want this. Even if I’m not confident I know how to market or network my art, I want to make a living being creative.
Eventually, I hope to build to the following goals (call it my road map):
Bundle pricing for monthly coloring art pages.
Coloring art books.
Fine art prints.
Tabletop Role-Playing Games I’ve designed.
And the big one: graphic novels of my stories.
I am honestly more of a storyteller than an artist. I’m geared toward the visual medium. My dream was always to become a filmmaker to tell my narratives. I have a feeling my filmmaking dreams are beyond me now, but I still have these wonderful tales to tell. Seems the graphic novel format is the runner-up to making films.
I hope you’ll be willing to join me on this journey. I don’t want to ask too much of anyone. I feel like we work harder than ever before to keep ourselves sustainable. I’m basically asking for less than a grande soy latte once a month, and if you like what you get, spreading the word to as many people as you can.
Whatever I get, I am grateful. Truly. There is so much content out there, that I feel a little crazy trying to compete for your attention. Well… actually, I don’t want your attention. I want you to stop, look, ask, contemplate what I’m offering. Whatever you discover, I hope you’ll pass on to others who will stop, look, ask, contemplate as well.
My creative garden is open. Come in and enjoy!
Open for business and thoughts about spectrums
This site is officially open for business. Now I’m just hoping that the traffic will come. Like any decent garden, it will take time for people to figure out that I’m trying to do something good here. Hopefully by coloring my images, it’ll help with a sense of peace or at least calmness. We’ll see how this garden grows. As I told a good friend when they were starting their online community, you have to keep serving the vegetables until people can start to understand how nutritious they are. The internet is filled with a lack of nutritious, life-giving, life-sustaining content. When you come across a good one, it is hard to understand why you feel better that you went there at first.
The best part of having the foundation in place is that now I can start generating and working on more art and stories. I’ve started working on a piece I’m calling The Flame Queen for now. I’m not sure how I feel about it right at the moment. It’s saying something to me, but I feel like I can’t quite… hear it properly.
The thought I have been having for a little while now is how spectrums seem to have been misrepresented. I want to do a piece on this notion. It’s playing around in my imagination. I’ll probably put it to work in some dreams tonight and see what comes up.
The basic idea is that I think spectrums should not be represented by a horizontal line. I know it’s all based on standard deviations from statistics, but I feel like… well, at least in psychology, that a line feels way too objective. For instance, on the autism spectrum, you have a range from low-functioning to high-functioning. There’s nuance in between, but this linear distribution completely ignores perspective.
I think a spectrum should be illustrated as a circle. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, there is a point opposite of your point in terms of perspective. If you’re at the top of the circle in what was considered low-functioning autistic & developmentally disabled, that would be only the opposite perspective from the high-functioning neurodivergent on the bottom of the circle. Before this gets everyone riled up, I’m not saying that one group of autistic people hates on or defines another group. I’m saying, the idea of high-functioning and low-functioning is coming from an observer of these two groups and what that observer has defined as functional.
This is kinda why I hate words sometimes. I can try and describe this idea a million times and never quite get it across. I draw it into an image that you can feel and resonate with, and it communicates it so much better.
This is definitely going to be something I’m putting into my dream work tonight as well. I have a vague image of the symbols for this concept coming together, but I haven’t been able to picture the final piece just yet.
Until it comes to me, I better get back to my Flame Queen before she tires of waiting for me.
I jumped the gun a little bit.
Okay, I was going to take these next four or five days to spend a little time fine tuning the site. I built some business cards and flyers to do some promoting (which I tend to suck at). I was going to wait until July to actually do my launch.
Yeah. Best laid plans. I launched tonight. Judging by the analytics, there’s not too much traffic to my site at the moment, so it’s not like anyone’s getting a jump on anything. I just couldn’t sit on it any longer. I felt the time was now. The hardest part was not gushing about all my ideas right on the home page. Because that’s my usual.
So, you’re welcome to check out what’s up at the site right now. I’ve still got a few things to work out, but that won’t be until there’s some more art. (Gotta decide if I want to do a mailing list and a subscription where you’ll get every monthly art that comes out for a yearly discount. Also need to figure out how to bundle art.)
I’m happy it’s finally live and ready to reach in through your eyeballs. I know my site’s not a lot, and I’m always worried I’ll come off as pretentious as I was in my twenties, but it’s what I’ve got to offer. With more to come.
Status Update, Captain…
I thought the most pertinent question that everyone out there in internet land would want to know was, where am I at with the construction of the site? You know. Because the world is holding their breath waiting for what I’m hoping to produce. You are, right?! I’m not just talking to myself, right?
The truth is, the most pertinent question right now is why the hell am I doing this? What is my mission? For that, I don’t have the best answer. Right now, with as dismayed as I am with the state of what I can only hope will remain the American nation by the time anyone reads this, the why I am trying to make a website is to make a living being creative. Sell shit. Plain and simple. I need to supplement my income because I’ve taken a risk to pursue what seems to be, for lack of a better term, my soul’s purpose.
It occurred to me at the end of last year, that I am a notoriously hard working and efficient employee, but I spend so little time busting my ass for my own hopes and dreams. Originally, all I dreamt of was becoming a working filmmaker (hopefully director/producer), but that dream is fading faster and faster as I near 50. Now, I just want to pull in enough income from my artistic style to make time for the really big creative projects I want to do. When I realized, if I could put even five hours of work at the level I do for other businesses, that I might just be able to pull this off.
The biggest issue of all is that I’ve never been a beacon of confidence, and I’ve always assumed that no one wants my art, much less be willing to pay for it. That part of me won’t change overnight, but I’m finally believing I can do it. No, I must do it. Physically, I’m probably not going to be able to stay in the semi-arduous job I’m in. I’ll probably need proper health insurance someday soon, and I can’t afford it with the income I’ve been making. You know, despite having a degree and making others ‘proud’ of me. This change has been coming. I’m not sure yet how to navigate it. I’m a little off the map.
Which comes to the last part of the why. It’s not just the income to support myself. I truly do believe there’s some good in my work. As pretentious as I feel like I sound, I only need to look at the banner image on my About page to remind myself that my pretentiousness is tempered by a healthy dose of levity. I probably won’t change the world. My message might get missed altogether by most. Still… I believe there’s some chord in us all that my art resonates with. Building bridges between people. Overlaping worlds instead of ramming them into each other.
I truly believe there’s harmony within my work, if you are open to seeing it. Open to feeling it.
I haven’t been the biggest fan of myself pretty much my whole life. I’ve lost touch with a lot of the people in my life I still care about and am kinda ashamed to try and get it touch. I can’t really change the past, but I am starting to say some good things about me. One of them being that I am a good artist and good storyteller. I have vision. I’m able to do some things that not many others can do. I have a potential that I haven’t fully actualized. I’m kinda being my own cheerleader, and it’s weird. Very, very weird.
So that’s why I’m making this site. I hope it becomes bigger than just a way to support myself. As for the status update, things seem to be on track for a July grand opening. I don’t want to promise anything, but I’m optimistic. I hope the few of you looking at my site and whatever AI bots have read this to try and sell me advice have enjoyed watching it come together lately.