The time has come again for me to start a blog. It seems to happen in four year cycles - I kept a blog for Uni, which was pretentious and terribly written; then a blog for Llwyddo'n Lleol thanks to their support, which is fun to look back at now to see how far I've come (despite more poor writing); and here we are now, in 2024.
I've been nursing the idea for a few months now. I hate to admit it, but the catalyst was the changing nature of Instagram. I've relied quite heavily on the platform for a lot of my marketing during my early career, and though I got a lot of work from it during the lockdowns, by 2022 it was already feeling a bit stale. You had to invest more and more time in the platform, creating videos and posting every day to keep the algorithm happy, only to see diminishing returns with every passing month. I'm quite private by nature, so it was stressful to have to keep mining my day-to-day life for "content". It was taking a toll on my mental health, too - though I love seeing the work of my fellow illustrators, I couldn't help but compare their popularity on the platform with mine, and whenever I shared a post that 'performed' poorly, I took it as a reflection of my artistic capabilities.
Of course this is silly, because I was getting plenty of work and working with wonderful clients, and at the end of the day that's all that really matters - but the platform is designed to make you feel this way. Comparison is the thief of joy, and the constant need to keep up with the algorithm was taking a toll on the quality of my creative practise.
The final nail in the coffin came in spring, when Meta decided to alter its' AI policy. From June, all content posted to their platforms would now be used automatically to train their AI models, unless users opted out. Unfortunately the 'opt-out' doesn't apply in all countries, and since I live in Macedonia, this wasn't an option.
Many people have written and spoken very eloquently about the ethical problems surrounding AI "art", so I won't re-hash their points here, but suffice to say I was furious. I'm not content to let a billion-dollar corporation profit from artists' work without paying anyone a cent, and so I haven't posted anything to Instagram since June. I deleted the app from my phone, and only check it on my desktop once a fortnight. It's had an enormous positive effect on my life - I didn't realize how much time I wasted there, or how bad it really made me feel. Since deleting it I feel like my creativity has come back in full force - I feel bored more often, and instead of scrolling through a sea of adverts and content I don't want to see, I spend the time thinking about stories, projects I want to work on, areas of my work I'd like to improve.
The effect was so positive that I was going to delete my account completely. I very nearly did, but when push came to shove I just couldn't do it. Despite its' flaws, it's a record of years of development. I started the account when I was 16 and in college, and even though I've archived a lot of the older, more embarrassing stuff, it's still a reminder of how much my work has changed over the years.
In the end I decided not to burn it all to the ground - in truth, anything I and every other illustrator have already put on the internet has probably already been scraped by bots, and so it seemed a bit futile. I still had a lot of lovely people following me there, who've supported and encouraged me over the years. On the other hand, I definitely didn't want to keep posting my work there, and so I had a bit of a dilemma.
I shelved the question over the summer - I was finishing my first graphic novel (which is very exciting!) and working on another, 60-illustration behemoth of a project at the same time, so I didn't have the capacity to think too much about it. After many late evenings and weekends of work, and a bit of carpal tunnel pain later, I'm happy to say that my workload is more manageable by now.
October has been an exciting month - the year often follows this pattern, with work intensifying towards the end of summer, and autumn bringing time to rest, recharge my creative batteries and think about what I'd like to achieve over the next year or so. This year has been no different. Since returning from a slightly disastrous hiking trip in Corsica at the end of September, I've been working with clients on some book proposals, developing my website, as well as working on some other exciting projects here and there.
Over the summer I lamented to my husband that I was burned out and wanted to take a sabbatical over the winter - he looked at me suspiciously and said "if you say so." Of course he was right, and a week after returning from the holiday he came home and asked how the sabbatical was going. I had to admit that I'd agreed to yet another project, and he rolled his eyes. The thing is though, I love this work, and it's so hard to keep some space for my own creative practise because I have such lovely clients and they always come to me with such exciting projects. It makes it so hard to say no!
Anyway, after a lot of soul-searching I decided I wouldn't delete Instagram, at least not completely. The thing I love the most about it was being able to share my thoughts and my work with others - illustrating is very isolating work (no one really tells you that!) so it's nice to put things out there sometimes. I wanted to keep a record for myself too - it's nice to look back and see how far you've come. Obviously, Instagram isn't the only way to do this, and so I thought I'd give this blogging thing another go. I'll probably use Instagram to tell people about the blog, but that's about it for now.
I'll try to post something once a month for now. If that fails, I'll just try again in four years.
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