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Creative Pep Talk
021 - You Must Stay the Same & Always Change
(upbeat music) Hey y'all, just a quick heads up. The episode you're about to listen to is eight to 10 years old. Now, these episodes were intended to be evergreen, and I still believe there's a lot of good information in these early episodes, but I do wanna let you know that some of my ideas have evolved over time. Times have changed since we made these episodes, and ultimately, I'd like to think I've grown a lot as an artist and a human, and that these don't necessarily represent my best work, or the best of the podcast. If you're new around here, I suggest starting with the most recent episode, or at least go back to around 300, and move forward from there. Enjoy the episode. The holidays are upon us, and finding the right gift for your kids, nieces, and nephews, and partner, and family members can be super difficult, but it doesn't have to be. Go check out Uncommon Goods. Sophie and I were checking it out the other day, looking for gifts for our kids. They have a make your own storybook kit, which we love. There's this cardboard tool kit, with a cardboard saw that's safe and connectors, so you can build cool stuff and forts and whatnot. They also got these building connectors where you can connect sticks and make them for it. Mainly, I just like forts, but there's tons of cool, creative gifts that will inspire your kids to go make stuff, but we could also easily have just bought stuff for each other, or even ourselves. This curated selection of goods means you don't have to scour the internet for something unique and exciting, and you're supporting artists and small businesses at the same time, which you know I love. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com/peptalk. That's uncommongoods.com/peptalk. For 15% off, don't miss out on this limited time offer, uncommon goods. We're all out of the ordinary. (upbeat music) Okay, well, hello there everybody. I'm back with another episode of the creative pep talk podcast. This is me, Andy J. Miller. I'm the guy with this show. I always struggle to say host, because it feels like a weird, you know, I'm just recording this on my own. It feels like, I don't really feel like a host. I just feel like a guy with some, with a pep talk, and that's what this is. Okay, I took a week off and that's because I had a crazy project that owned me. It had a really tight deadline. It was great, but it exhausted me and I had no extra time. The other reason was is because I had some exciting news for the podcast that I wanted to kind of do some prep for. I redid the podcast image and, you know, I've been working, worked on the brand of it a little bit, which I'm sure iTunes will update in its own sweet time because that's what it does. But yes, I have some new, exciting news that I am really excited about, and here's what it is. So the illustration website, illustration age, illustration age.com. Thomas James reached out to me and asked to kind of web syndicate the show on their site so that people can find it there and that it'll update to their site with new posts so that, yeah, so we can reach a bigger audience of illustrators and designers with this thing. And the cool thing is that Thomas James actually did a podcast a few years ago called Escape from Illustration Island where he interviewed famous illustrators and I've actually listened to every episode of that. So, you know, he's been a big inspiration for me from the podcast side of things and so it was pretty awesome. Nice little circular loop of things to come back to me. And I'm just like, yeah, really pumped, really excited. That doesn't mean anything's gonna change on the show. The only thing that's gonna change is I'm gonna give a shout out to the fact that you can listen to it on illustration age. And other than that, I'm gonna retain creative control and all that good stuff. So, otherwise it won't change. It just hopefully means that it's got a chance to get out to more people so I can get more illustrators and designers out there pumped up about what they're doing which really excites me. You know, I do this to help people stay encouraged and stay kind of thinking critically about their own practice and growing and also just a place for me to kind of think out loud on the stuff that's going on in my work. I'm a believer in the idea of dressing for the job you want, not the job you have and I have applied this to my creative practice too which means if you want professional results, you need to present online like a pro and that means going beyond social media and having a professional website that reflects your style and looks legit. I rebuilt my site this year with Squarespace's Fluid Engine and was so happy with how easily I could build my vision without coding that when they approached me to support the show, I jumped at the chance because I love and use this product. So, go check it out Squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out for yourself and when you're ready to launch your site, use promo code PEPTALK, all one word, all caps for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks goes out to Squarespace for supporting the show and supporting creators all over the world. Hey, in case you don't know, we have a monthly live virtual meet-up every last Monday of the month with supporters of the show from Patreon and Substack. We have so much fun on these calls and they are the warmest, most encouraging creatives that I have ever met. And we also talk real creative practice stuff. We have authors, illustrators, lettering artists, picture bookmakers, fine artists, musicians, and folks that work in video and film as well. And we have people that are just starting out, people super established in their creative careers and everything in between. For the rest of this year, we're gonna chat through our new Journey of the True Fan series, exploring questions and ways to apply these ideas to your own creative practice so that you can leave 2024 stronger than you came in with more visibility, connection with your audience and sales. Sign up to whichever suits you best at either patreon.com/creativepeptalk or antijpizza.substack.com. And I hope to see you at this month's meetup. So today, today I'm thinking about, I was thinking about this idea of platitudes and cliches. You know, whenever you start trying to think about general truth in regards to anything, you often, you know, I love this idea that you take these kind of complex experiences and you boil them down into little ideas that you can remind yourself of some kind of truth that you've discovered, you know? That's my personality type. So this week, I was actually, I invited, I invited Will Bryant and Jin Masari separately to Skype with my self promotion class at the Art College locally here, CCAD, the Columbus College of Art and Design. I had them Skype with my class and answer questions and first of all, I just wanna say thank you because you guys were awesome and if you don't know Will Bryant or Jin Masari, you should go check them out 'cause they're amazing illustrators and their work is fantastic. At the end of the conversation with Jin, I asked her if she had any last kind of tips for my class and we kind of went on a side road about this idea of, you know, whenever you try to do that, it's hard not to start speaking in platitudes and kind of, I don't know, gets a bit cheesy and I don't know, you lose something. And that conversation got me thinking about this idea of, you know, can you really boil down truth into little pithy statements? And I don't know, you know, I don't know if you can, but you know, that then led me to this idea of contradictory statements as boiled down truth. And I'll explain what I mean by that, okay? If you listen to this podcast at all, you know that my main source of wisdom comes from Fraggle Rock. And I'm kind of, I mean, I guess that's kind of embarrassing, but it's just the truth. And you know, I've talked about this episode, there's an episode on, it's called The Minstrels. Go check it out, I think it's season one, if you've got Hulu, go check it out, it's The Minstrels and they've got this character, it's voiced by Jim Henson in Canthus and he comes with his magic pipe, I talked about him on an earlier episode. But he's one of these guys, these guru teachers and he speaks in contradictions and it sounds all mysterious and all that. And I just, I'm obsessed with that. I'm actually, I've always been obsessed with that idea and he says stuff like, she's got a long way to go, but the journey is short or that's where you're right and that's where you're wrong. There's actually another character on Fraggle Rock that says his name's Mudwell and it's in the episode Gone But Not Forgotten season four. If you wanna check that out. And it's, he says, you have to leave to stay. And you know, I like these on a silly level, but at the same time, you know, there's something about taking two contradictions and like exploring the space in between them. You know, even like Jesus, I think, had one of these, which was like, you have to lose yourself in order to find yourself. And, you know, I heard Frank Camaro said in one of his, he quoted someone, I can't remember what it is and I'll try to put a note out there when I can figure this out. He said that he said that, you know, if the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth. And I think that it's so true. And I think that, you know, I don't know, I'm just drawn to these things. Even my, one of my favorite bands in high school, Monos Mouse, they constantly, their lyrics are constantly contradictions and even their album names are things like good news for people who love bad news and building nothing out of something. And, you know, I started thinking about this and at the same time, I've been thinking of this other idea, which I'm finally gonna say, this is the episode is about, you must stay the same and always change. And I've been thinking about this idea that, you know, in my mind, being successful has something to do with, having a high demand on your work and being able to sustain that demand for a lifetime. And that's a serious, that's a tall order. But if you ask these people, these creative people who've managed to do that, I think often their advice is contradictory. And it sounds, or it sounds contradictory. And it's like, stay true to your core, stay true to yourself and never stop growing. And I wanted to dive deeper into this idea and kind of parse it out and see if there were some general things we could take from it and we could practically apply those to our own careers or at least I could. You know, Robert Hunt on "Your Dreams My Nightmares" podcast, his final bit of wisdom was, you know, he's had a long illustration career and he's never stopped growing and, you know, he's still making great work today. And his advice was never stop growing, you know? And I think, but how do you do both? How do you stay true to your core and never stop growing? How do you stay the same and always change? And so I want to look at that. I want to think about that in a practical way, you know? So what I've got here is I've got five different things and they all fall into either the category of you must stay the same or always change and I'm going to flip flop back and forth just to balance it out. And I think, actually, if you dive deeper into these ideas, there's some specific applications that make it make more sense, at least to me. So, you know, what got me thinking about this, actually, was there's a new song by a band that I'm really into called "Waxahatchee" and it's called "Air." And she's got her third album coming out. And I started to, you know, I was so excited because this new song I feel like is better than any of the other songs. And I just thought, man, it's so rare. Like, she's obviously got it like a hang of something about being able to grow and stay the same because this new song does things that none of her songs have done before. But at the same time, it sounds exactly like what makes her great. And so I started diving into this idea and actually, you know, just to give you background, her first album is this really lo-fi acoustic guitar and her singer-songwriter thing. And then the next thing that she does, the next album is a full band, but it's still raw. And this new song has this amazing sonic quality that none of the other ones did, the production. There's something about it that's just amazing. And the actual structure of the song sounds like it has just a lot more mastery in the way that it's, I don't know, the way that the pacing of it. And I started thinking about, so what's the deal here because so many bands get this balance wrong of staying the same or changing? And the thing that she did, you know, all the way throughout the content or the thing that she's accomplishing every album is sharing these kind of gritty details of her life and relationships and doing it in this imperfect way, but pushing it out there with this music that has this like universal pop element to it, to where it, and she never loses those things. She just pushes them. And so I started thinking about, you know, how do you do this systematically as an artist? How can you harness this balance? And so that's what I wanna do. So I've got five ideas on how to do that. The first one is to find your core. Okay, sounds super easy. Just find yourself. Yeah, no, you know, and this is an ongoing thing and I haven't done it perfectly, that's for sure. But I have learned a few things that I think that may help you or you could do more and I can always do more of this too. When you're trying to define what it is, your thing is and who you are as an artist in the foundation and the values that you would bring to the table, that you're gonna bring to the table and bring to your work for the rest of your life. You know, trying to define that, I think one of the easiest ways to do that is to look back into the past. You know, I had a conversation with my aunt recently. She was talking about her daughter and I just said, you know what, like based on what I knew of your daughter when I was a kid and I knew her as a teenager, you know, I didn't expect her to turn out the way that she did, you know. Like as a, you know, and I think and she said, well, here's the thing, when people get to be teenagers, they really lose themselves with all the stuff that's happening, all the changes and everything. You know, they lose who they really are. But if you looked at her as a kid, like before pre-teenager, she's actually very similar to that person. And I got me thinking about this idea that, you know, if you, whatever you have in common with your seven year old self, like that's unlikely to change at this point. Like the things that you responded to when you were seven, if you're still responding to those things, that's something you can bank on. That's part of who you are at the core. And I'll give you an example for myself. So when I first graduated college, I felt like I didn't have enough of me in my work. And I've talked about that before in the podcast. And I feel like what I did, I went through a time of like, I want to get, I want my voice to really shine through my work a little, you know, more. And so one of the things I did was I got, I thought a lot about, you know, what did I, what really emotionally really struck a chord with me as a kid? And then especially those things that I still think are amazing now. And for me, okay, maybe it's a little bit more relevant 'cause I make work for kids a lot, are quite often. And that is true, that's true. But if I look back at Fraggle Rock, even if that didn't directly relate to my work, which it does obviously, even if it did, I could take a look at that show and I could say that really moved me as a kid. And what was it about it? And actually, I know the creators went into that show, wanting to make something for kids that tackled existential ideas, spiritual ideas, relational ideas. The big, airy, hard to grasp things about life. And actually, those things are things that I'm drawn to now. I was drawn to then, I'm always gonna be drawn to. And my work, I always wanted to have that quality of the hidden side of life or the intangible side of life and the bigger ideas, the less practical things. I'm always gonna wanna do work like that. And I always have. I've always been interested in that. So I know that's a core value of my work. It's never gonna change. And I think if you look back into your past and you identify the things that are similar to the things that you're into now or the things that you do or like, I think you're gonna find your core and that you can stick to. And that's one of the ways you can stay the same throughout your whole career. Now, my second thing is define the things that you respond to today. Right. Now, I feel like one of the ways that my work grows or that I try to let my work grow is I'm never, I'm always trying to stay inspired. And so, you know, one of the things that is really inspiring me right now is really good kids' movies. And they're hitting me even harder and in a new way than they did when I was a kid. You know, as a kid, I think a lot of movies you're just entertained by and that's fine. That's great. Take, for example, Finding Nemo, which I think is a great story. I really love a lot of Pixar films. And I think today I'm responding in a new way to these and I'm kinda taking note of it because as a kid, I would have been entertained by the movie. But as an adult, I'm actually kind of emotionally drawn into it because it's about this dad who's overprotective, who's like, and it's to the point where it's hurting their kids, his kids. And I can relate to that as a dad now. And so that, you know, I know what it's like to wanna protect your kids and keep them from really living because you love them so much. And so that strikes me on an emotional chord in a new way like it never has before. And so I'm keeping note of those types of experiences. And for whatever reason, at this time of my life, kids good, really good kids movies are really affecting me and movies about, or shows about family and relationships. And so as I'm growing older and these things are becoming a bigger deal to me, those things are influencing my work. And I'm thinking about how does that affect what I'm doing? In a minute, I'm gonna talk a little bit about this idea. You know, another platitude you hear is, there comes a point in your illustration career when you need to stop looking at other people's work, right? Now, I have to disagree with that. I agree with it and disagree with it. Another contradiction because I think it's part of a truth. And I think, you know, I'm gonna talk about this in a minute. I think there's phases when you need to do that. And there are phases when you need to be tapped in to what's happening. And I think that's part of responding to things in your current life because you're gonna respond to things now that you've never encountered in your whole life that are really gonna move you. And in those ways, you're gonna allow those things to evolve what it is you do. - When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping king supers for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouthwatering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings, king supers, fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply. Okay, number three, uncover the straight path. Now, I try to think of this like if you think of your life, and every day is a dot on a line graph and it's kind of like, you can see, so if you're thinking about it in a day-to-day picture, if you look at five dots, or if you look at 10 dots or 20 dots as 20 days, 10, 20, 30, 50 days, right? You might even, you see that these dots are the direction and trajectory of your life. And the stuff that you're into and the stuff that you do, it's gonna zigzag all over the place. And that can be really confusing 'cause it's hard to understand maybe what your life's about or who you are as an artist. Because you're all, you're darting all over the place. If you're looking at, say you're just looking at a year of dots on this line graph, 365 dots, it might look like this crazy zigzag all over the place. You're into this, then you're into that, then you're doing this and this opportunity comes and you're doing different stuff all the time. And I think that can cause you to maybe feel like your life is a massive zigzag. But I think if you step back from the line graph and you get a big view and you look at your whole life as a series of dots on this line graph, I think you start to see a pattern and the line doesn't look like a zigzag anymore. It looks like a straight path and it's going one direction. And maybe you don't know exactly what it is, but I feel like if you step back and you quit getting sucked into the moment, you can kind of see there's this general trajectory. You know, Steve Jobs and his commencement speech for Stanford. You know, I talk about that a lot. I love that speech. He talks about you can only connect the dots of your life looking backwards. Like you don't know how it's going to play out. Now, I think if you actually do look back and you kind of look at what are the patterns that have kind of happened. How, you know, when I met that person and it led to this job and that job led to this job and this person and then I met that person and this opportunity opened up and that got me into this. If you actually look back, you can see the path. And I think if you can identify that kind of pattern, you get to know something about the core of who you are, the part of you that needs to stay the same. And you can also look into the future and kind of guess some of the what, where you're trying to go. Like, where is it that this thing's leading you? I really think for me at least that that really helps to understand that maybe there is a more straight path than it feels than you can feel. I feel like so often you hear people look back and they say, I didn't know it at the time, but that job, that random job I had, actually really impacted the work I'm doing now. And so I think that's number three is a way, uncovering that straight path is a way that you can look at your career through the lens of staying the same and staying true to your thing. Number four, on the side of always changing and growing, believe in seasons. I wanna look at the path and look at my life as one big thing, but then I think it's also, you need to hold that in relativity with the idea of every season is different. And just because something's right for today doesn't mean that it's right for tomorrow. Just because you, this thing's really working for you now, doesn't mean you're always gonna do that thing. Because I think that your life has to, it has to evolve, it has to grow. And I think if you see your life as a series of seasons, you know, it might be winter now, but summer's coming later and it's gonna be things are gonna happen and you're gonna evolve in a way that you don't expect. And I think here's kind of my analogy for this and why I think this is important, okay? If you think about it in terms of people that you've met or people that you know, let's take the staying the same one. Someone that takes that and that's all they do. They don't do the, they never evolve. How many people, you know, you know these people that it's 10 years after high school and the person's living in the same town, which is on its own not bad, but living in the same town, doing the same kind of job, doing the, you know, maybe even living with his parents, doing the same kind of activity, doing the same stuff on the weekend, doing the same kind of parties, you know, all that jazz. You know those people and you know that it just doesn't feel human to stay in that same spot. It's not believable. I think work that, you know, illustration where you never evolve it, eventually it feels dead, right? And I think, I think that, you know, I feel like if you, you know, a living thing, part of like science says in order for it to be considered living, it has to move. Like even trees move. Like they slowly move towards the light. Like everything, every living thing has to move. And if you're not moving, eventually your muscles break down and you die. And I think you can't just stay the same forever, right? But at the same time, what about these people that you know who are constantly changing to this degree that it doesn't feel human or authentic or believable? It's an imitation of something else. How many people, you know, have you met this person? One week, they're Republican. The next week they're Democrat. One week they're obsessed with this breed of cats. The next week they're obsessed. They don't even, they hate cats. Don't talk to them about cats. They never liked cats. You know, those people, it's so, you can't, you can't beef, you can't, it's hard to be friends with those people 'cause you don't know what you're gonna get. And you also feel like it's phony because you can only change so many, you really change so many habits in a year, you know? Maybe one. You can only really have a, you know, a life-changing experience that really impacts you only, you know, a few times every five years. And so, always changing like crazy is not believable and it's not realistic and neither of these actually stay the same forever or always changing constantly. Neither of them feel human and work that doesn't feel human is really hard to engage in. And I think if you think of your life as seasons, when you think of it that way, you can explore something for a season and you can set that down. You can explore this process and you can go into, and maybe you're in a season where you're focusing on editorial work, but the next season might be book covers. You know, it's okay to do that, but it should be seasonal. It shouldn't be every day's a new season, you know? And maybe it doesn't actually go inside with the seasons of the year, but this year you're in a certain season of your life and you're probably gonna be there for a while. And so, I think that kind of view helps you to kind of think of your life as something that can change over time. The other thing I think that helps me to kind of understand this idea of seasons for myself. You know, I love to look at the music industry and think of art in those terms because they're so good for case studies because of the way that they produce work is in these big chunks with albums, right? So like every album, if you look at that as a different season, right? And if you're an illustrator and designer, you're probably producing a lot more work than one kind of finished piece of work every several years. But if you took all of that work you did in a two year period of time, you can think of that as like your album. And so, for me, one of the things that helps is kind of thinking about this lens of what kind of band do what I wanna be. So, you've got beach house on one extreme. Now, I'm gonna only talk about bands that I think are really successful. Beach houses probably leans to the side of staying the same, okay? So, if you compare a few tracks on the first album and a few on the second album, you could almost interchange some of those songs. Like, they feel like they could fit on either album. But if you compared tracks from the first album and then the fourth album, there's enough difference there that you can kind of tell that you can see the progression even if it's really slow and intentional. Some of you might be like that. You know, your nature might be to just stay the same. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, you've got someone like Radiohead. Now, the thing about Radiohead is they'll reinvent themselves every album. But the truth is, the thing about it, the reason why I think that fans still respond and still love it is because it's believable and it's authentic. Like, they don't just dive into a genre without knowing anything. I feel like everything that they do comes from real response to what they're living. It's a real response to the music that they're writing and it's believable and authentic because they embody every move, right? And I think you can sense that when you're engaging with the work. Now, for me, I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle. And my example for that is Montes Mouse because I feel like every album, that signature guitar playing with the harmonics that Isaac Brock does and just the way that he approaches guitar, every album you can hear that sound. But every album, there's a significant shift forward. And so, it's very in the middle of those two things. And I would like to be someone who, every year, my work is fresh in a new way. But it's never disconnected from what I've done in the past or who I really am. And so, that's kind of what I'm shooting for. Now, you're gonna be probably different than that. All right, my last one. My last one is neither spectrum. It's just a general principle. I suggest whatever your nature is, if your nature is to stay the same, or if your nature is to always change, I say, push back against your nature a bit. You know, I think we all have, you know, all of us have our own inclinations and the direction that we kind of tend to go towards, right? So for me, I know, I tend to want to change things up too quickly. Like, I love new, I love new stuff. And so I know that, if I'm not careful, I'm gonna force change in my work that I haven't earned. You know, I'm gonna change things up too quickly that I haven't earned. Like, I haven't gone through the experience to really impact my work enough to make that growth. So one of the things I do is, I have extensions of my work. I do work for other, you know, I do a little bit of graphic design, just a tad. Just, I have a, you know, I have this client that I've worked with locally for a long time and I like doing that because I experiment over there. You know, I only do it maybe once a month or something, but I experience, I experiment over there in ways that I couldn't do my own work. And about a year later, those experiments seep into my work in ways that feel natural and comfortable. But I have to do that intentionally. I have to be kind of disciplined about not scrapping everything and starting afresh. Now, you might do the opposite. You might feel totally, you might totally hate the idea of trying something new or messing with the formula of what you do. But I would say, if that's your nature, you kind of have to systematically do things that help you reassess every year where you're at and maybe start introducing just a little grain of something new so that over five years, you're in new territory than you were five years ago. And I think the reason that is, I think in order to have a great demand for what you're doing, you need to be true to who you are and what your work is really about and who you really are about. But at the same time, if you want that demand to keep steady over a lifetime, you've got to let your work and your energy and your work grow over time so that in 20 years, it doesn't feel dead and lifeless or it's totally irrelevant from what you're doing. I just want to go back to this number four real quick 'cause I forgot to say about the seasons. I hear a lot of people say this. I think it's kind of a, I think there's some real truth to this. This idea that there's a season of your work like in your college where you're going through the imitation phase, you're taking a lot of ideas in, you're looking at tons of other people's work. And then you have a season where you don't look at the work so much. You don't look at almost anybody else's work, you're just doing the work. Now, I believe that, I agree with that. I've got a suspicion, though. If you want to make work forever, those two things just have to be seasons. And maybe they're five-year periods of time, like, and maybe they overlap. But I think if you're going to want to work until you're dying day in this field, you're going to have to, at some point, check in with the industry and get fresh excitement about the work that you're doing. And that's going to come from new stuff happening in the industry. And so I think you can't just sign a paper that says, "I'm not going to look at any more work." I think you got to some point, when things start feeling stale, go check out what's out there. Now, if you're a professional, you're not going to go right back into that imitation phase. But it can excite you and inform you. You know, it's like these people that were working while the digital thing happened, right? The people that embraced that, at least to the degree to where they could send their finals digitally, and they could communicate in the way that art directors wanted to communicate. But then especially the people whose work got better, as the tools got better, as they saw what other people could do with this digital technology, those people kept going, but the people that didn't probably didn't. And so I don't think you can just say, as a platitude or as a pithy kind of thing, like you go through the phase of looking, and then you do the doing. Like, yeah, that's true. But I'm going to look at those as seasons, because I want to never stop growing. Okay, so that's been it. I got really excited again. I'm really grateful for all these people that subscribe to the podcast. I really appreciate the ratings and the reviews on iTunes. Those keep coming in, and I really appreciate it. So if you love this show, it would mean a lot to me if you go and write a review on iTunes, because I know that's how the show grows. And I really appreciate it. I also have a big shout out to illustration age. Next week, I will have a link to share on the podcast on where you can find it on illustration age. Again, thank you, Thomas, for reaching out to me. I'm really excited about this. I think it's going to be a great partnership. Another thing, with the poster I did that do not be afraid, I got quite a few emails and responses on social media. And so I went ahead and printed it. I should be getting it tomorrow, and it'll be up on my website on next week. And I'll give you a reminder on the podcast. If that's something you want to scoop up, I'm really excited about it. They're going to be offset, I think 11 by 17, I think they are, posters. And yeah, I'm just really pumped about that. Thanks for all the responses. I'm an encouragement. I hope until next time that you stay super excited about your thing. Like, you know, I know for me, I got to do all kinds of things to keep from getting discouraged by even just the little things because I think making art can be, there's so much resistance that comes up against you when you try to go out there and make great art. So yeah, I hope you stay peped up. Thank you for listening. Hey, all, one more quick thing. Earlier this year, I rebuilt my website using Squarespace's new fluid engine. And I was so pumped about how it turned out that I have been really thrilled to find as many ways to partner with them and tell you about what they can do and bring you discounts as possible. With social media going haywire, I think having a site that feels as unique as your creative work is essential to building trust with your target audience or your clients. I have had several clients point out how cohesive and fresh my site looks lately. And if you want to check that out and what I was able to do without any code, check out AndyJPizza.com. If you want to test it out, go to squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out yourself. And when you're ready to launch, use promo code PEPTALK for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks Squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people. Do you love hair raising allegedly true stories about the paranormal? Then some in the podcast Scared to Death. It's the popular horror series with more than 60 million downloads and is co-hosted by me, Dan Cummins. And me, Lindsey, co-host and also Dan's wife. Each week on Scared to Death, we share bone-chilling tales from old books and creepy corners of the web and some submitted by our listeners all designed to make you sleep with the lights on. Think you can handle the horror? Tune in to Scared to Death every Tuesday at the stroke of midnight to find out.