my initials are BA. stands for badass

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"Your work is a gift and the world is fxking waiting for it"

James Victore says this in a video that I watched 2 days ago. Seth Godin also says something along the same lines. Basically, don’t ask permission to create something. Just make it. (See how I resisted Nike’s Just do it slogan.)

Make it. And never hold back because that’s what artists are good at. They don’t save a specific stroke for a different project even though at times when I’m making something, I hold off certain pieces for a better time. (Working on that) However, who cares if I have to reuse an image. No one really cares especially in this digital age because someone will see it for one second, double tap it, and move on. Our society today has the attention span of a goldfish where we just forget everything. Sure, there are helpful options such as archiving, but if you archive it and say that you’re going to use it as a reference for a project, you’re most likely not going to use it. I have so many archived posts from instagram and pinterest from the last year and a half that I said I would make something with, but never did until now. I have so many photos that I could’ve just thrown into a layout. I also could just take images from online and make it into a layout. For the longest time, I believed that I had to wait for the job to tell me that it’s okay to make something. Recently at a job, I just made something to make something, and they liked it and posted on their page. They didn’t even know that they wanted me to make it. I just made it and it got recognition.

My point is, just make it. The worst that can happen is that the person sends a cease and desist letter. The best is up to your imagination.

Below, I decided to copy/ take inspiration from several posts that I pinned from instagram and archived on pinterest. These are for a small digital zine that I’ll be posting online in a little bit after I have all three made and mocked up so that I can use it for a portfolio.

The concept behind it is, “what happens when you’re sober at a party and have a camera?” Or rather, “what happens when you just have a camera.” For the longest time I’ve believed that I needed to be a part of a collective to make one of these things. That I needed permission to make it. The permission that I have to make this is my own and also by the fact that I bought the Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud a long time ago and can make whatever I want. I don’t need permission. I don’t care if it’s bad or if it’s good. As long as I think it’s good and as long as I made something, then it’s a success. And with this theme of this blog, success is the compounding of small significant steps that lead up to a big thing - I just don’t know what that thing is.

Bradley Afroilan