800

To celebrate a personal milestone marking my 800th tweet, I decided to create a custom lettering illustration.

"Thanks for letting me be a small part of your window to the world!"

Modeling & rendering software: Rhino3D + KeyShot

To better understand why a social media milestone would be worth marking, the following excerpt was taken from my response to a positive post comment over on Ello: 

I’m sure most creatives who are extremely passionate about what they do, want to be able to make a reasonable living making art and designing. There are so many talented individuals and studios across the globe that making an impression or establishing connections with potential clients and art/creative directors can be difficult, and at times, seem near impossible. The misleading, overused expression of successful people in various industries preaching others to “Do What You Love / Pursue Your Passion” is more complex than simply quitting your job and expecting things to work out just because you are passionate about something. Finding, let alone sustaining, a creatively satisfying career is a constant struggle for many, but all one can do is to keep making work they believe is meaningful and remain hopeful that the right people will take notice and believe in that work too. There doesn’t always have to be the prevalent dramatic narrative playing on peoples’ emotions to make work that matters. Creatives have to seize opportunities that may not be seen as significant to others to show that yes, there can be value in something perhaps as mundane as the celebration of 800 tweets. The fact is, the artwork exists because I believed in making it happen. And hopefully people see the beauty in that.

An article appearing in the Summer 2014 edition of Printed Pages (The It’s Nice That Magazine), where Rob Alderson interviewed Marian Bantjes, touches on the elusiveness & precariousness of ‘making it.’

“Everybody’s different and times and situations are different… People look at my story and they want to hear me say ‘Just follow your dreams and it will all work out,’ and it’s not true. It’s so variable. There are so many people who are trying to do what they love - what they do best - and not making it. What if I tell them to just go and do it, and they come back to me in five years, broke, their wife has left them, their kids are starving in the street… it usually doesn’t work out, I was lucky. But on the other hand I hate to say don’t try your dreams. It’s a really difficult thing.”

Believe in yourself.