All of me

Hello friends. I'm here to report a very exciting merger. Today two worlds collided as I merged my older personal blog "The Flying Pencil" with this one. If you dare, you can now read all my posts from April 2007 to present. From now on I'll be doing all of my blogging from this address.

Why the merge? Well, I'll start out by saying it is due time for a little house cleaning and getting back to basics. As you might have noticed my blogging has been suffering from a serious case of the blahs. It started happening months and months ago and I felt genuinely sad about it. At first I blamed it on Facebook - it felt like 'microblogging' was sucking the blog juice out of me like a thirsty virtual vampire. As compelling as all the status updates, pointless quizzes, and name generators are I sometimes question what all this has done to my attention span. Suddenly reading - let alone writing - a blog post felt kind of pointless. And, I really started to believe that blogging was dead.

As a tonic for my anemic online persona I enrolled in Marisa Haedike's online e-course called In The Fishbowl: Life as an Artist Online. And thank goodness I did. Marisa is a wonderfully talented artist, who has been making her living by selling her art online for a few years now. If you are not familiar with her work or her story head on over to her website Creative Thursday, pronto. She is such an inspiration, and as I get to know her better through her weekly online classes my respect for her unique knowledge just keeps growing.

Our last class dealt with creating (or improving ) your online presence. In the class Marisa urged us to be authentic in our blog writing - reassuring us that this is what people really want to hear from an artist or any creative person for that matter. Mulling over this brought up something I hadn't thought about in a long time.

One of my biggest peeves in back in art school was being required to listen to some old fart with a Ph.D. (and a fake English accent) proclaim with absolute certainty to us what all the artists were 'thinking' when they painted this or that masterpiece. This used to drive me nuts. How I wished that I could have just asked the artists themselves. I spent a lot of time doodling in my art history classes under the dusty glow of the slide projector; daydreaming up conversations with Van Gogh and the like. 15 years later, I got my wish (no, not a beer with Vincent). I now get to peek inside the lives of many of the many artists, illustrators and writers who inspire me. This whole blogosphere is a huge gift, especially for people like me who work in solitude most of the time. Through blogs we get to know something about what goes on behind the scenes in an artist's world, first hand.

I then had what I like to call a "chocolate and peanut butter moment" like this:



Back when I started Pixel & Post I thought I should have a separate blog to write about my business journey. I thought I'd just keep all the business stuff on this site, and my personal stuff on the other site. The minute decided to keep these two things separate, I stopped being excited about blogging. The business blog felt like homework. I felt like I had to come up with some insight about being a successful artist and business person. This time it was me with the fake English accent. My little Facebook updates were the only place where I was being myself online, so of course that is where I've been hanging out (and learning really important stuff like what my Garbage Pail Kid name is).

Giving myself permission to be me - all of me - here feels pretty freeing, and for the first time in a long time I feel excited about blogging again. Combining these "two great tastes that taste great together" feels pretty good. I hope you'll enjoy what I'll have to share in the coming weeks: the business stuff, the personal stuff, and all the stuff in between.