About
Welcome to my blogsite! I'm K-Tee! And I like to draw...a lot. I also like to create my own characters and wanted to give them a place to shine. ✨
I grew up watching a countless amount of animated projects. And as I grew older, I discovered that dedicated teams of adults were working together to bring these projects to life. The amount of effort they were putting towards their work, deeply inspired me to pursue a career somewhere in the artistic field. Before I could fully grasp what animation was, I had already been drawing and creating stories for a long time. Once I became serious about having an artistic career, I used a How-to-Draw Manga book to help develop my skills and selected all of the art-related classes throughout my education.
In the years that followed, I constantly fantasized about the day where I would finally do something bigger with my art....but it never felt like I was ready. I didn’t have the money to purchase the right resources, and school was taking up so much of my time. Then when I graduated, I started to become doubtful of making it in the animation industry. It was beginning to look really demanding…it made me question if my work, or work ethic, was good enough.
Instead of putting forth an effort to reach out to someone about this, I allowed my fears to stall me much like I did when I was a student. I convinced myself that my career would happen at some point, but I continued to kick that can down the road as I occupied my time with everything else.
My biggest distraction was creating fanart of my favorite properties. I found it easier for me to build off of a pre-existing world than to build one from scratch. Other than sticking closely to making fanart, I was too busy watching other people succeed in the type of career I wanted instead of allowing it to motivate me.
The other jobs I was taking in place of that were unsatisfying. I was grateful to have somewhere to work but at the same time, nothing really seemed like a good fit for me…it felt like my contributions weren’t meaningful and that my presence was more of a nuisance than anything. Maybe I misinterpreted what was going on, but I did want to keep feeling this way. I wanted a job where I could feel confident about what I was doing and put my best skills to use.
So, towards the end of 2021, I finally got fed up with keeping that student mindset and began to make plans for my business journey. I joined multiple print-on-demand sites, created new characters, as well as other designs, to sell on my digital storefronts, and set up an Instagram account to promote them.
While I do love that starting out like this encouraged me to create original content and listings for them, this plan didn't go as well as I had hoped. Instagram had changed the way they push content to other users since the last time I had joined the platform, and this was extremely hard to accept. I eventually had to stop and start over to think of a better plan.
My opinion of Instagram, and social media as a whole, was beginning to sour...If I had a lot to say about a post, the character limit in the description would cause me to continue in the comment section. And for whatever reason, the statements end up out of order...There's not much control over organization. There's pinning and highlighting, but things quickly get buried over time; there's no search bar for your page if you're looking for something specific. And worse of all, Instagram removed the Recent Tab from their search results! Now the visibility of your content is predominantly based on how much attention your posts get! If you have a smaller following, it's much harder to grow...
On the opposite end, the print-on-demand sites I signed up for have even less to work with. None of them have a feature to alert anyone about any changes I'm making to my shops or what's next for my business. They would have to be curious enough to come over to Instagram. And what I wanted to do with sharing my artwork, was too big for just Instagram. This shouldn't be the main place for everything, it's better suited for lighter work. I should be using it to direct people to a place where it's easier to keep everything together. And if the platform was going to make me worry too much about not getting enough traction and make me feel insecure of my skills, it should be more of a backburner thing.
It was becoming very clear that I needed a website. I was already in the early process of creating this one, but I was too fixated on figuring out Instagram and having a selling strategy, that I didn't make enough time to get back to it. So, in the Summer of 2024, I decided to shift my focus over to that.
Even now as I launch this website, I’m still not ready to reveal the characters and stories I’m the most passionate about. But I need to get started somewhere. I should at least drum up some interest to help me build up to that point. As I get there, I intend to produce content like showcasing my artistic process, reviewing products, introduce my characters as I'm selling them and (maybe) sharing my own take on art trends and challenges. I also hope that my journey will inspire others who have been hesitating on their dream job too.
Let’s see how it goes!✍🏾