last updated: 5.19.2021

Some history…

Personal blogging in platforms such as livejournal, wordpress, fc2 and blogger to name a few are what people consider to be a thing of the 2000s. I remember being very young and seeing my favourite artists and writers having fc2, blogger and wordpress blogs to record their processes, talk about their ideas and sometimes, real life stuff that happened and they wanted to rant about it. I got inspired to make blogs because of them. Alas, I didn’t get to post consistently in many of them (fc2 was probably the only semi consistent one.) Schoolwork and other rl stuff got in the way.

Now, social media such as tumblr, twitter, IG has replaced this because of its ease of use in marketing, making connections, a huge potential audience and convenience. However, despite a lot of its advantages, its drawbacks are that it lacks the intimacy and personal space which were the hallmark of 2000s blogging. On twitter and instagram for example, when you’re going through your feed or checking on someone’s account, you are bombarded with so many ads and recommendations.

Obviously, social media has helped me gain an audience especially from tumblr and I am extremely grateful for that but I also wanted to have a “safe space” or a sanctuary for my thoughts and drawings without that many eyes and this prompted me to start a personal blogsite….again.

2015

I created my old milliekou blog back in 2015 as a journal and a place where I can upload drawings and thoughts without any audience as I was dealing with social media anxiety. It was made in secret though, without notifying most of my followers that time since I didn’t want any eyes prying into my stuff and to avoid being judged. I eventually changed my mind and linked it in public in 2016. Throughout those years, I’ve had my ups and downs but mostly downs as I was still suffering from very terrible depression and frustrations irl (Hence, so many angry, childish and dumb posts, lol.)

2015 was also the year where I started to get serious in improving my drawing skills as drawing for me before was a very leisure hobby, something I did during my spare time without the motivation to get better at it. In 2014, I couldn’t care less about anatomy, proportions and all those other fundamentals. I would just sit down and draw whatever came to my mind which wasn’t bad in itself. Understandably, that indifference towards improving in art was because I drew without any following and social media art account to motivate me to improve. But in 2015, if I wanted to produce decent-looking works now that I had some semblance of a following, I needed to learn more and polish my skills.

Late 2016 and attempting to do comics

After getting quite bored with making illustrations, I dived into making comics (or doujinshi as some people term it) in late 2016. I was a total beginner though and I didn’t know what entailed into comic making. It was a very new field (and medium) to me as there were so many elements in there that aren’t present in illustration such as panelling, flow, sfx, etc. After some time (and a number of failed and cringey comic strips lol), I was able to be slightly better in that field. Comics were a way of telling stories through art in a very controlled manner and that appealed to me so much as I wanted to tell stories but illustrations lacked the structure and control, personally.

I’ve been passionate with making fan comics since then that I made another blog in wordpress solely for them.

2021 onwards…

It’s been almost six years since I’ve been blogging and I’m quite proud of myself for sticking to something this long for the first time in my life, lol. But come 2021, I decided to start this new blog and leave my old milliekou.wordpress blog not because I’ll be donning a completely new persona but because 2015 up to 2020 marked a period in my life that was filled with severe depression, baggage and confusion. I’m not escaping from it nor erasing my past but it doesn’t mean I have to be surrounded by them. I still stick to some of my opinions in my previous blog but I also don’t agree with some of them now. I’m a human and I grow and change, hopefully for the better.

Also,

this one has no ads since I paid for a personal plan, lol.