Day 2- Intentions
I haven't really thought about how I'd use this blog yet. There isn't any specific way I'd like it to be presented. I detailed a little bit about how I wanted it to be a general space for me to divulge my interests and musings as I transition into an actual career, but what does that mean? I have a few more ideas.
Something I hope to aspire to are daily updates (or near-daily at least). I'd like this to be something I consciously take care of and maintain so that it becomes a sort of digital mosaic of my early-mid 20s and beyond. How I'll maintain that frequency is up to me, but my idea was that I'd write little excerpts like these... or I could post my art!
I haven't really drawn much over the past year and a half. It comes with a lot of guilt or shame-inducing feelings. I never really kindled a flame that drove me to create consistently outside of high school- and even then, I was mostly motivated by commissions and art project deadlines (nonetheless, I was driven and actively creating). Something massively changed in college where I just never felt secure in my surroundings. I was never challenged creatively nor was I really given a focus or vision of sorts to guide me along my educational journey.
Now, to clarify, I don't think someone necessarily needs to be given a focus, vision, or roadmap in order to discover their muse. For me, however, I think I need structure to start. I often struggle in the dark, and though I think I'll come to adapt (as seen by this blog's existence), I was never this person in college. At the very least, I seldom was; I can only point to a few instances where projects truly captured me and I was able to flourish and compete with my peers- improving as I went along. And AET never did me any favors with how it abandoned its path system (I ended up taking entry-level courses for 4 years and learned nothing about industry-level expertise and workflow). This, in turn, burned me out in a way I would never wish upon anyone, and thus I came to associate my art, and ability to make art wholesale, with this struggle. I never want to return to that struggle, and so my brain interprets this to mean I never want to return to art consistently.
But don't I actually?
I don't see myself as an industry game designer or animator anymore. I don't want to fiend around in lower level jobs for years only to maybe score a promotion to a mid-level management/animation role later in my life. Moreover, I don't want to be sat in a room at my desk all day! Worse, the more my work scales in success, I get closer to the abhorrent crunch culture that pervades the brightest stage of game development and animation. That I'm also not a resident of South Korea or the Philippines also inhibits my ability to actually make the animation I want to make frame by frame (at least in the VERY SPECIFIC line of work where I'm involved with a studio big enough to offload work in that way- I'm not one to be content with just storyboarding).
Game dev isn't just animation, and animation isn't just drawing frame by frame- equally, it isn't just grunt work that gets leveraged and abused in poorer countries by wealthy studio execs. So what is it to me? What is art to me anymore?
One of the things I'd like it to be is my own means of expression. I'm the primary creator and foremost distributor of my work. And that's what's great about my blog: it's exactly that!! What's more, I can actually touch upon the sour spots of my college legacy and learn code for my own benefit! I want my CSS to be unique and flagrantly personal, but I also want to know what I'm doing with it, both for myself and so that I can impart my knowledge to others, and potentially to other aspects of my creative capacity. One of the biggest hangups for me in college was my lack of coding and mathematical prowess. I was always ahead in math in school, and to make things easy for myself after years of grinding, I was able to skip taking math in my senior year of high school (I'd already completed Calculus the year before and received college credit for it). I had the option of taking statistics, but after my hellish junior year, you couldn't torture me into taking math that wasn't algebra level at most. Therein steps my computer science principles class, where it precisely was that level, and so I was content. Couple this lackadaisicalness with an atrophied college career, and you get me today. Not confident in my analytical abilities at all with a shocking lack of expertise on what could get me jobs as a dev or animator.
So, what about my drawings? Well, AET was never really a drawing-focused major (there was no focus period, but I digress). A lot of people who got into UT chose this major as a safe option to get into a prestigious school without doing proper research on what the classes would entail. Not that they could, as they didn't update their class and focus options for their post-COVID environment... where all of what mattered was gone or set to be going very soon. But what this ultimately meant in terms of class composition is that a lot of artists there were at my level or WELL below it, with very few surpassing my level of skill. Mind you, I wasn't the best artist in my art class in high school, but I was far from the worst- I was quite good and still am! What this composition meant for my development, though, coupled with the lack of classes that would hone my ability to draw or engage with other mediums, was detrimental to both my motivation and my skillset. A lot of visual artists in AET were EXTREMELY amateur, and no one ever really got better. Sprite programs and other visual mediums helped certain people get by, but for those who wanted to hone their drawing skills for animation or rendered work for their games... they were SOL. Four years later, I hadn't improved, and I was less primed to engage in things that would challenge me for fear of further destroying my already burnt-to-a-crisp ego.
Over the past year and a half, I've slowly recovered my abilities and willingness to engage in mediums or styles that aren't necessarily my wheelhouse. I'm still very conservative with how much I'm venturing, as I've yet to really establish a feedback loop with my art that feels good, but I'm getting there! At the very least, I've started to draw more... even if it isn't that much! That just means it'll just be way more to regale upon in the future- more for me to appreciate and gush about.
And herein lies this blog. I want to code, I want to draw, I want to DESIGN. I want to do anything and everything to make this my space and have it not only advertise my skills (if only to myself and some friends), but also be a mirror/diary of sorts for me to look at and appreciate my gradual curation and progress. Once I crack HTML, I'll go further into other languages... and I even want to re-learn Calculus and other related maths for higher-level systems in games I might want to make! It'll make me more secure with myself, at least... I did spend $50k for a degree whose foundation mostly consists of last-minute, half-assed work that got an A until I literally stopped trying altogether. That and a whole lot of free time spent playing YuGiOh... woof.
So maybe you'll see comics. Maybe you'll see drawings. Maybe you'll see art, coding, or website tricks all in one! Hopefully I can live up to that. I fully intend to anyhow.