How to Resurrect A Blog

By acousticpaint on September 17, 2024

*Taps mic* hey is this thing on?

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I posted here. Since I last updated, an entire global pandemic happened and I got two degrees (with a third on the way!). I also survived an illness, adopted seven new lizards, a tortoise, moved across the country (2200+ miles), started my own business, changed my name, and a whole host of other things that happen in one's early twenties.

I can't tell you why I stopped blogging. It was some combination of self-hatred, depression, college (which is just a cocktail of both), and being generally too busy to muster the energy to write about art. That doesn't mean I stopped making art, just that I stopped sharing it. I kind of bounced from social media too, which was an overall positive thing, and now just keep my art to myself.

Until I brought the Acoustic Paint YouTube channel back from the dead on a whim and now we're here. How? Let's discuss.

Step 1: Graduate from college and keep making art

Okay, graduating from college is not a prerequisite to this, but I was already there and it seemed pointless to not finish, so I did. I received a BA and MA in military and public history in 3 1/2 years while keeping up my art. I floundered quite a bit during my sophomore and junior year because I was recovering from a major surgery and having my professional life flipped upside down as a result, but I kept at it (kind of) and really fell back into stride my senior year. Sitting in endless meetings and lectures over Zoom, I was able to keep making art.

Step 2: Realize your art is actually pretty good, and the natural consequence of drawing consistently for eight years is upward creative mobility

I've always had a super supportive group of family and friends who loved my art, especially when I was sharing it in the first few years of the blog. However, it wasn't really until Inktober 2023 that it really dawned on me how consistently I was able to make "good" art (or, more importantly, art that I both enjoyed and felt fulfilled creating). As a result, I created a portfolio page and tried to get in touch with more creation-based jobs. No such luck, but picking through the hundreds of pieces I've made to find the cream of the crop to share on my profile, I could see side-by-side all the creative success I've been so fortunate to have.

Step 3: Revive a long-dormant YouTube channel with easy and fun content that doesn't require too much mental effort for a decent video

This was mid-March 2024. I had several clips of an older, extremely complex drawing rotting away on my phone that I decided to edit together. I added some music and a voiceover that took about five minutes to record, and posted the video. After almost two years of silence on that channel, I wasn't really expecting much to come out of it, but I received almost 1000 views in the first week. Again, I had been building this channel for several years, but it was nice to see some old viewers were still interested. Here were really the first stirrings of whether I should bring back the blog.

Step 4: Make a bit too much art

I always have some sort of project going. Since I've been getting into digital art, I have multiple projects going. Often, I don't record most of them just because of how tedious it is to set up the camera, figure out where my audiobook is going to play from, and make sure to press start to actually record everything. I do still take many pictures of the art process, which seemed to be the fertilizer for the seed that was resurrecting the blog. I already had/have all these photos, why not put them to some use?

Step 5: Review the list of old blog post ideas you haven't looked at for five years, and come up with several more new ideas

Of course, the second I briefly considered writing more on the blog, my brain fired off at least ten new ideas that would look so good on the feed (without stopping to consider that I had to be the one to write them, of course). So, I went back to my roots and reviewed a few old ideas from 2019 (gasp!) and saw that some were still incredibly viable, while others were incredibly not. I added the good ones to a potential list, and scrapped the others.

Step 6: Worry briefly about AI content generation and its potential impact on both your written work and your visual work

We live in an irritating time. The words I write here and whatever pictures I post of my art are bound to be collected into one big data scrap AI engineers might use to train their stupid models. Everything I create likely will be filtered in with every other piece of stolen content and repurposed without credit by a computer and some tech bro with no creativity. I'm staunchly anti-generative AI so this was the biggest hold up for me. But these thoughts were quickly followed up by...

Step 7: Realize that in the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter because AI art developers will mod their programs faster than developers of masking services, and they'll get to your art anyway

I'm a small fish in the global pond, so the chances of my work getting taken by AI are just about the same as those of anyone else. I don't make particularly unique work, nor do I make enough money to hire a lawyer should this pose an issue. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and wait for the agonizingly slow legislation to catch up with the funky gaps in AI development that may or may not ever happen.

Step 8: Write a post about the blog's renaissance.

[Read above]

Step 9: Rinse and repeat until you go back to grad school in the fall and inevitably fall off the face of the earth again

I don't know how long I'll be able to blog for, or even if I'll do it consistently. I have an idea to release posts bi-monthly, which gives me a manageable twenty-six to write. If each post averages 1000-2000 words, that is almost 52,000 words outside my usual book-writing, conference paper writing, thesis writing, and general school work. Most of my school papers are around 5-10,000 words, my books are about 130,000 words, my conference papers are between 6-8,000 words, and my last MA thesis clocked out at a good 30,000 words. Restarting the blog would bring my annual word production up to over half a million. In a world full of statistics, that's pretty jazzy.

To wrap up, here were the steps I took when I decided whether to bring by my long-dead (and probably mostly forgotten) art blog from high school:

Graduate college and keep making art
Realize my art is really quite good and want to start sharing it again
Start by resurrecting your YouTube channel and post consistently for a month
Make such a volume of art that it's really unfeasible to record all of it via video
Daydream a list of new blog ideas and look up old ideas you've had lying dormant for five years
Worry briefly about AI art and data scraping if you were to start posting pictures again
Realize that in the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter because AI art developers will mod their programs faster than developers of masking services
Make a post explaining that you're resurrecting your blog
Rinse and repeat until you go back to grad school in the fall

Anyway, thanks for reading all my new ramblings. Let me know if there's some stuff you'd like me to write about, art or otherwise, in the future. You know where the comments section is. I appreciate everyone who has supported me from 2017 to now, and hopefully there will be some more good stuff in the future. 🙂