There's a version of this blog that existed before today.
It had categories: Art, Design, Marketing, Web. It had tips. It had headlines like "10 Essential Tips for Digital Artists Just Starting Out" and "Social Media Marketing 101: Building Your Brand's Presence." It was competent. It was organized. It was completely impersonal.
And for a while, I told myself that was fine. That's what blogs are supposed to look like. Give people useful information, build an audience, monetize. That's the formula.
Here's what I didn't tell myself, or anyone else: I was hiding.
Twenty years is a long time to detour
I grew up drawing. Sketchbooks, margins of notebooks, the brown paper bag school book covers; remember those? Before I knew what a career was, I knew I wanted to make things with my hands: illustrations, comic book characters, worlds on paper. That was the plan, until it wasn't.
I got to college and discovered web design. This was the early 2000s, when websites were still a novelty and anyone who could build one had a skill the world was suddenly desperate for. I pivoted. Web design led to website administration. Website administration led to digital marketing. Digital marketing led to a career… titles, teams, budgets, boardrooms, Zoom meetings, all of it.
My first job out of college, I was handed the entire online presence of a Fortune 500 oil and gas company. That's when it hit me: okay, this is what I do now.
For over twenty years, I worked in corporate marketing. Oil and gas. Legal services. B2B organizations where the stakes were high and the creativity was carefully managed. I was good at it. I built things. I solved problems.
And somewhere in there, I stopped drawing.
Not dramatically. Not on a single day I can point to. It was more like a slow fade. Life happened. The sketchbooks got buried under work bags and laptop chargers, the pencils migrated to a drawer. The habit just quietly dissolved the way habits do when life fills in around them.
There was a five-year stretch where I moved every single year in Houston. Apartment to townhome to house. Midtown to Westchase to Cypress. Every time I packed up the sketchbooks and art supplies, I thought to myself, ‘I need to get back to drawing.’ I never did.
I didn't miss it, exactly. Or maybe I just got good at not noticing.
The layoff
Three years ago, I got laid off.
I'm not going to dress that up. It was disorienting in the way that only losing something you'd built your identity around can be. Twenty years of being the web guy, and then suddenly… no team, no title, no Monday morning reason to open a laptop.
I tried to land somewhere. Applied for jobs. Did the networking thing. Started a freelance agency. Built the website. Wrote the copy. Created the brand. Tried to make it work. And then I tried some other things too, pottery, furniture flipping, vintage reselling, print-on-demand, because stopping felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit.
But somewhere in the middle of all that motion, something quieter was happening.
I started drawing again.
Not because of a breakthrough moment. Not because I read something inspiring or watched a documentary that changed my life. It was more gradual than that. A doodle in the margin of a notebook here, old sketchbooks and faded watercolor pads picked up at a garage sale there. A slow drift back toward something I used to know about myself.
And the longer it went on, the more I realized: this is the thing. Not the agency. Not the client calls. Not the t-shirts… well, maybe the t-shirts, I'm still leaving that window open. This idea of making things with my hands, building an illustration practice, finding out whether the creative person I was at twenty is still in there at forty-something. This is what I'm actually trying to figure out.
The digital versus the tangible.
The blog that wasn't really mine
I started Brush & Bytes because I had marketing expertise and I wanted to share it. That part was genuine. But somewhere between the first post and the fortieth, the blog became something else: a performance of competence rather than an honest account of experience.
I wrote tips because tips are safe. Tips don't require you to say anything real about yourself. You can hide behind a listicle. You can be the expert dispensing wisdom from a position of authority, and nobody needs to know that behind the screen, you're also the person lying awake at three in the morning wondering if you made the right choices, if the creative thing is a fantasy, if it's too late to start over.
I was writing for an imaginary reader. The ambitious creative who just needed the right framework. But I never stopped to ask whether I was actually that reader's peer, or whether I was just performing the role of someone who had it figured out.
I didn't have it figured out. I still don't.
What this becomes now
Brush & Bytes isn't going away. But it's changing into something more honest.
The categories are different. Instead of Art, Design, Marketing, and Web, four department labels that could belong to any agency's blog, there are four words that mean something to me personally right now.
Create: the illustration practice, the creative process, what it actually feels like to make things after a long time away from it.
Build: visual identity, design thinking, the craft of making a creative business look as intentional as it feels.
Grow: marketing and audience-building, but written from the inside, not from above — what I'm trying, what's working, what isn't.
Publish: the digital side, websites, SEO, the infrastructure of showing up online on your own terms.
Same territory. Different relationship to it.
And the voice is going to be different, too. Less authoritative. More like a journal and less like a textbook. I'm not going to pretend I've solved the problems I'm writing about.
I'm going to write about them while I'm still solving them, because I think that's actually more useful.
Who this is for
If you've ever felt like you're in between versions of yourself, the person you were professionally and the person you want to be creatively; this is written for you. If you've quietly abandoned something you cared about because life filled in around it, and one day you looked up and it was just gone, you already know what I mean.
And if you've been hiding behind the safe version of something because the real version felt too exposed, well, you already know I understand that too.
I haven't figured it out. I haven't built the illustration career, landed the clients, or resolved the tension between making things and making a living. I'm writing from inside it, while I'm in it, because that's where I actually am and because I think there are more of us in here than the polished, optimized corners of the internet would have you believe.
What happens next
Over the coming weeks, I'll be updating older posts, rewriting them in this voice, retiring the ones that never belonged here, and adding new entries as I go. If something disappears from the archive, it wasn't deleted, just honestly evaluated.
New posts will come every few weeks. Some will be practical, the marketing and web stuff I know how to do and want to share more honestly. Some will be more personal; the illustration practice, the creative fears, the slow work of figuring out what comes next.
If you've been here before, thank you for staying. If you're new, I'm glad you found this at the start of something rather than the middle of a performance.
Either way: welcome to the actual version of this.
— Mike
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