...

Life is pretty weird.

I went to college, and I have a bachelor of fine arts. I concentrated in animation, but they purposefully gave us a BFA and not a Bachelors of Animation or whatever because they said the vagueness of the title BFA would be more helpful with getting us jobs.

Funny way to put that, considering I do not have a job related to art whatsoever. I was unable to find a job fitting of what I went to school for. I've tried several times to monitize my art in other ways - I had a patreon, an etsy, and I worked hard to promote my art for years online. There just came a point, though, that I had to stop doing it for money. It sucked the fun out of it for me like a vampire. I was working on a now hiatus-ed comic, and trying to keep up with making one page a week for a patreon was a lot on top of my day job and taking care of myself. I wouldn't mind picking it back up again to be honest, but I haven't been up to visual art in forever at this point.

I just burnt myself out of it. It just wasn't fun to force myself to draw. Now, I have done an art zine that I thought was pretty cute (and I still need to upload it to this page), but asides from that, that was it. I was learning how to do graphic design for months, and there was a just a point where that wasn't fun either. It's just extremely hard because the thing I went to school for, the thing that's been my life's passion, is just simply not desirable right now. I'm not trying to knock myself, but visual art, and particularly animation, is such and oversaturated and unstable market and job field. You work mainly on contracts unless you get extremely lucky, and for animation, you have to move to New York or Los Angeles to really get an in office job. I'm simply not interested in moving to either of those places.

That's why I got back into writing. Writing, for me, is much more lowstakes. It's so easy for me to express myself with words right now than visual art. Sure, writing is a skill too, but just finding words... Something about it makes my brain think it's easier. I've always been into writing, too, so I'm sure that's where my desire came from. I'm just more of a visual person is all.

But recently... I'm starting to get the itch to animate again. I watched Izzizzy's animation pilot Wastelandia this morning, and it got me excited for animation all over again. Animating my thesis for school was really fun, and I'm glad I'm starting to get that passion back a little bit. The problem is that I no longer have access to the tools I did for school, so I'd need to find alternatives for a good video editing and animation software that's relatively cheap. But those sorts of programs are never cheap, lmao.

I don't know, it's like animation and visual art is just tied to The Grind for me. I think that learning to dissociate art with making a living from it would probably help me find my flow back. Perhaps I will make little animated gifs for my website! That would be exciting. And it's honestly so easy. Like 5-10 second gifs? I know how to do that like the back of my hand.

My style has changed a lot throughout the years. I'm professionally trained in art, I know how to do a lot of traditional mediums like painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, pastels, animation. I have to give myself credit: I know how to do a lot of things, and I was lucky enough that I was trained in those things. A lot of people can't do that, so I just have to remember how lucky I am.

But yeah, I think I might start with little animations for my website and see where that takes me :)