Hello, Ghost World

A watercolor journal page of uneven boxes in varying sizes and colors outlined in black ink against a gold acrylic marker background. The journal sits on a textured mauve chair cushion.
This might not be as good as it gets, but it's good enough for now.

It has been a day.

My Sunday started out with a plein air watercolor ditty (not shown here), then walk before the heat became too deadly. I was chased by one of my new neighbor's seemingly countless dogs (a stumpy critter resembling a rat terrier, who instigates the others to bark incessantly, and manages to slip through a fence or gate gap to harass passing vehicles and humans).

After a shower, I set to work building a Notion blog site from a modified template, hoping it could scratch the itch that my beloved Pika page cannot quite hit (big images to replicate the Instagram experience, now that I'm avoiding Meta products as much as possible).

Then I tried to integrate the Notion blog with Fruition, to which it did not come, plus CloudFlare to make a custom-domain-having workaround to the platform's paid tier. No shade toward Fruition, I have skill gaps that this exercise did not correct, and Notion is apparently increasingly fussy about these things.

Then I tried to make something similar using GitHub pages and a Jekyll template, all guided by ChatGPT. No dice. My eyes always glaze over when design and dev courses mention learning Git, GitHub, the command line, et al, to my great detriment. And I certainly acknowledge the risks of trusting AI, but it had presented itself so confidently at the outset!

Literal hours later, after much gnashing of teeth and somehow minimal tears, I decided to work with a ready-made publishing platform. All of this after deciding to pause my dream of a hand-coded blog site in a Cargo Collective style as part of a larger portfolio project. Pretty hubristic, for the reasons alluded to above. And because I didn't already have something perfect in place, I wasn't wanting to write at all. Quel horror.

Now I am here. I want to share updates from the creative practice I've had since birth but have been keenly placing on a pedestal as a means of coping with everything for the past year or so. Right now, that looks like remedial watercolor, weird fiber art, and walks in nature. In the near-ish future, it could also look like digital illustration (I've got a tablet coming and a learning course queued up, oh boy oh boy) and thoughts on branding and creative strategy (because I'm figuratively dressing for the job I want/wish I already had 10 years ago/have maybe had all along in spirit if not title and compensation and demonstrable skills).

So, thanks for being here. This platform seems lovely so far, and maybe even worth the investment. If time spent hyper-focused on stuff that didn't work was transmuted to dollars, I could have felt better signing up eight hours ago. Always learning!