"Why don't you make art anymore?"
[drawing from 2008]
So the "jetgirlart" screen name came about during college... 22 years ago. I got a bachelor's in fine art and used it to get various graphic design jobs here and there between having kids. I kept the screen name for all my social media and games but after college I didn't really keep up with making "art".
In college they taught us all the techniques and such to get your work into juried shows or galleries. That's what a fine art degree does vs a graphic design degree. But the problem I instantly ran into was that I wasn't good enough to get into those shows. I didn't have a personal style or theme that set me apart from the other artists. That is a huge deal and you need to figure that out asap when you start wrapping up your fine art degree. I didn't, and fell out of touch with that world.
After college I worked in web and print shops making flyers, biz cards, websites and such for the longest time. With kids and work I couldn't set up something like oil paints or anything because they would get into them. We didn't have tons of room or money to make stuff that wasn't going to sell.
At the time I was still really into playing videogames and drawing webcomics and sketching and all that. After my second kiddo I was home recovering and got really into art history. The stuff they went over in school was very old and very simple. That's back when I started doing an art history podcast and researched more artists and all the cool stuff current people were doing.
The last "art" job I had was doing graphics and film separations for screen printing. I really really liked that job but everywhere I tried to go only offered $13 an hour no matter my portfolio or experience.
That told me I didn't have the skills or ability to make that a career. In 2013 I sat down and plotted out how much it would cost to open my own print shop and the 20k in equipment alone just shot that idea out of the sky. I tried printing my own stuff at home with small time equipment but the prints had a high failure rate and ended up costing me more money than I could make.
That was probably for the best because not long afterwards they came out with those home vinyl cutting machines that could print and cut iron ons and everybody started just making their own custom shirts. They didn't need me to screen print anything for them anymore.
So then I just did freelance graphic and web design. That actually paid something so I stuck with it. But I've kept the "art" bit in the screen name because that's just what my screen names have always been. But you won't see sketches and drawings or anything around here anytime soon. I do draw stuff like, once a year, when I get a wild spike of "I need to draw something." but yeah, don't stick around waiting for it.
I switched to writing after years of tinkering with it. Writing is much easier to do and my kids can't spill $45 worth of ink on anything. I do still like art. I like going to museums and galleries to see what folks are up to but that's even more rare.
So for now I'll use my powers for good and help get other people's work published with the magazine. Making graphics for the issues and tinkering with the website keeps my tools sharp.