Reinvention

 Hello Readers!

I come to check on my blog pretty infrequently, but always find myself wanting to start again and again. And thus, here I am once again typing, but also, I'm finding that since I was last active so much has changed. 

I was inspired one day to follow some live streams and found myself wanting to also "go live."  In this spirit I borrowed some money and made a plan to become a streamer.  Me being me, I had to watch a million videos on the subject and learn everything that I could in an effort to not fail miserably.  Many issues arose. 

While I wouldn't say I failed, because in essence I feel I've barely begun.  In essence, my motivation moves wildly from hardcore gaming streamer to quiet artist in the shadows. I suppose it wasn't really my intent to game stream solely, but I did spend a lot of the budget on games, they are quite expensive at times after all.  But I managed to use a deal or discount or coupon every chance I could just to make sure I wasn't being too wasteful.  As a stabilizing measure, I spent a little on video and art software.  My idea was that while gaming to an audience I could also use these newfound tech tools to further my art.  I've always loved digital art, and I've always needed a better tool than my phone to practice it.  An iPhone is seriously hard to make art on.

I guess what it all boils down to is that I felt this process of metamorphosis.  I had already been through a lot in the last few years and as I crawled out of one cocoon and into another, I couldn't help but feel I wasn't doing enough.  And at other times, I was doing too much.  Perhaps as a creative you might identify with the feeling of being pulled in many different directions and not knowing which to explore.  But this latest spark came from the popular game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons winter advert

I'm not even sure how or why I was initially intrigued, but I found a video creator that was doing amazing things with the game and also began doing live streams which I delighted in tuning in for.  For hours I watched gameplay and listened to this creator talk about life and share funny moments and engage with his chat audience.  It all seemed like so much fun.  I loved games, but that fell to the wayside over the years when I decided I should be more serious about my art.  Anyone who loves playing games, knows the tale of someone, a parent, or someone close casually mentioning how games are a waste of time.  And true, they are entertainment much like Netflix and online dating.  But no one scoffs at spending an entire weekend of binging on the latest series and exploding at the seams in anticipation of talking about it. But something was different about this.  And looking back, it all seems inevitable. 

You see while I'd always loved to play a great role-playing game in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons, even forming a group with my friends in college, I never really did it with anyone else much.  In college I frequently had friends over to play, or later having LAN parties of the MMORPG we all loved.  This is a gamer event like a party someone hosts, and everyone hooks up to the internet on separate computers to play an internet-based game in which everyone has a character they've created, and then plays together in this game world.  It was all very geeky, very time-consuming, so much fun, and also very social.  

Apart from the fun, I enrolled in a course to learn game design.  From an outsider perspective the programs seemed very tedious and confusing, but as I loved a challenge and I loved games and art... how was this not a perfect combination of a class?  I remember spending hours in the computer lab after hours and tweaking all the details of my models and animations.  This process made my art come alive.  I was obsessed.  I didn't do very well in the subsequent iterations of this class as many of the assignments were open-ended and I didn't do very well with creating my own discipline and structure.  But nevertheless, a seed had been planted. 

In the years that followed I found myself alone in a new city and away from all my game loving friends and I once again found myself thrown into projects and work.  I won't deny I feel I accomplished a lot in this time and managed to cross off many of the goals I'd set for myself.  Off the heels of depression, rejection, and job loss, I still found a way to make art, and play solo games that in turn inspired more art. An excuse I would later use many times in order to play more. 

After my last relationship failed, I lost interest almost entirely with games.  I began to associate them with the loss and felt that my time spent on gaming was wasted because I hadn't been nurturing my relationship.  In this newfound depression I resolved that all things to improve my life would have to somehow be working to pull me out of this dark hole I had dug.  Gaming had not made the cut and so I had avoided this favorite pastime for more than a year.  When I eventually came back it was very casual time, and only for a short time.  I somehow didn't trust that I was doing the right thing, or that time wasn't better spent.  

Getting out of the apartment that my ex and I had made a home, was the best thing I could've done.  I didn't much feel like moving physically, but mentally it was a must as I had been stuck there in a lease for an entire year just as a human shell going through motions. Very careful not to trigger a memory while just trying to exist in this space.  In my new apartment I was reinvigorated, and once I began to feel more like myself after much too long, I dusted off the game system and was once again happily transported.  Every time something struck my fancy in this fantasy world, I was reminded of how these things were made, and how I might've done this at some point professionally.  If only I had pursued it a tiny bit more. 

I good friend commissioned me to create some marketing images for him, and as payment, the result of a passing discussion we'd had on my future and my work, he purchased a Nintendo Switch and sent it to me.  I was...floored.  It was much more than I was going to charge for my work, but there it was.  I thanked him profusely and he told me to let him know when I started streaming.  I honestly wasn't even sure I could, but I had to at least try now.  The thought wouldn't escape me and learning to stream consumed me in the months that followed.  

My first stream in September of 2021 was awkward and rife with complications, but I can honestly say it was the most fun I'd had in a long time.  It was important at the time, that I honored my journey to that point and make it about what I was most passionate about, my art.  The program I chose, Clip Studio Pro, was brand new to me and I had so much to learn in using it, so I thought what better way to be entertaining than fumbling around this program and create something.  I only got about 3 viewers, but I knew I couldn't expect much, and I counted this as a tremendous success.  I had fun.  I knew I wanted to do this more, and I immediately wondered if I could keep it all up. 

I tried to be careful in all my decisions, but I worried if this was not all a by-product of my Shiny Object Syndrome.  It didn't seem possible as I had waited for more than a year to get to this point.  But I suppose it was more troubling that once I got here, I wasn't sure what to do.  Here I was an artist, working in traditional media, doing an occasional show, and getting the occasional commission, now charged with figuring out digital media and making it work for my career. Where would I find the time for streaming, and art, and art streaming, and friends, and family, and pay the bills. 

I'm not the first to embark on this journey, and I've had many an inspiration that has kept this fire lit.  My doubts attempt to blow out the flame almost on a daily basis, but I think I've learned the value of baby steps. I think I end up stumbling back onto this dusty ole blog for many reasons, but the biggest being accountability.  And another being documentation. Gary Vee on YouTube says that's important. 

I've begun to note this change, this metamorphosis, as Reinvention.  Many artists go through it.  Many artists may not understand it or realize it's happening.  But just the same as when Picasso moved into his Blue Period, and Madonna donned a cowboy hat, reinvention occurred, and artists are then freed up from their "normal" methods of expression into a new arena with new challenges.  It's important for growth.  I've been drawing since I was a child.  It wasn't even until college that I even learned to paint. And even that seems like something I've done forever.  

The point is really that the landscape is always changing.  I'm grateful that my curiosity and hunger for knowledge pushed me to learn new things and explore different mediums of expression.  For me in this moment that's not merely "gaming" art.  While it's fascinating and fun, I think the creative river, the stream if you will, is pointing to the fact that I don't have to be alone in my studio, and I don't have to have a residency to have my art seen or experienced in real time.  I don't have to imagine what something I create might look like if it moved.  I can just make it.  And others can come along for the ride.