Divide of the personal self and art
Another rambly think piece; I guess my blogs end up being more of a dissection of my own self more than anything, or a study piece of something ... but I didn't always used to have such a divide of the personal self, and the 'art' self.
Back when I was active on deviantART, I just had the single account where I yapped about things I liked, and posted my art and fics too. There was no barrier between myself and the artist, and even when I first moved onto tumblr, I posted all of my art for the most part on my personal account, or my roleplaying account (which you can argue is also 'personal' and 'art' combined).
At some point I ended up making an art tumblr to upload and store all my art to, but it wasn't used much since I still preferred posting on my roleplaying blogs that I was consistently on.
It wasn't until joining twitter in the ... 2017-2018 era ... that something changed. To be fair, Twitter nuking your media to a shitty gallery didn't help, but I still posted my art on my personal twitter. I also began doing commissions at the end of 2017, and eventually began to move from pet site currency commissions to actual money commissions in a few years.
So it was hard to really facilitate art commissions from a Twitter account that I kept private just to keep it to my own hidey hole, and it didn't really work to have my roleplaying blog be an official "art" account either, nor did my personal blog really feel appropriate as a landing page for people when I'm here reblogging the 'do you like the colours of the sky' and pictures of plinko horse gifs.
So by necessity my art accounts came into being, that were just art, and some chatting here and there from me.
It's so weird because I ... don't mind when other artists are vocal on their accounts, and reblog things that have zero relationship to their art because they are just people with interests. But I can't do that to my own. It's so hard to be open on my art accounts, outside of tiny spurts, because I have a mental barrier of a 'persona' when it comes to how I portray myself as an artist. It's not that I haven't yapped about things I like (god knows you can find me being unhinged on my Bluesky over zhongvie, tags does help for that), but I always feel like I have some need to curate everything.
Twitter definitely hasn't helped with having basically no way to filter out just the artwork ... Bluesky has helped with having feeds and functional tags but ... (vaguely gestures to the ongoing censorship shitshow). Sheezyart is great but it feels more like a gallery than anywhere to really be unhinged. Tumblr I have already my personal blog of 13 years, I don't have a need to talk on my art blog there. Pillowfort is probably the closest where I also feel more able to talk, like Bluesky.
It also doesn't help that I tend to have low social energy now, and tend to find it the easiest to be vocal on my personal tumblr, that's 99% just random crap (fondly). And it sucks because artists being personal is what's appealing to people!! I'd love to yap there!!! But I have such a mental barrier around it, that it makes it hard!!!
And it sucks because it's you that draws people in. Pretty art is nice, but it helps to know the artist beyond that. People do get me on those, but not in full.
And I want to keep personal and 'professional' separated, its why all my personal accounts have slowly migrated to not be under Asuraid, but under things like zhongvie, or sylviegirly. It's easier to reblog my own art to a personal account, for the people who are cool with me being unhinged and uninhibited there, and leaving it as just art and a more neutral self on my art accounts.
A personal part of me is always on display even on my art because my art is centered around Sylvie, who is my comfort character.
I dunno if I have a concrete point to this blog, in particular, outside of this: man, it sure sucks to juggle persona masks sometimes, but I very explicitly want a divide between my 'work' and my 'self'. Anyway to those who are on my personal site/blog, congrats! You get the full unfiltered self.