32. Authentic Who? 🎭

The other day, I was painting, and I kept trying to fit it into what would sell to a mostly English-speaking market, which left me frustrated and feeling like I couldn't get the paint on the paper the way I saw it in my mind.

By the end of the day, I spit out one Inuktitut card in Roman orthography, and then I was like, this is it; this is where my niche is. Sure, it's a language spoken by fewer than 30k people who probably won't buy my cards, but it's where my heart is. 

That's the part nobody tells you about chasing "authentic." Sometimes it doesn't look like your biggest audience. Sometimes it looks like 30,000 people, most of whom will never see this card, and you make it anyway, because the second you stop optimizing for who'd buy it, you can finally see what you were trying to paint in the first place.

I didn't start TQP to build something that scales perfectly to an English-speaking market. I started it because I couldn't keep hiding the parts of myself that don't translate easily, Inuktitut included. If the market's small, it's small. It's still mine.

Go find your version of the one Inuktitut card. Whatever that is for you. You don't need it to be good yet; you don't need it to be marketable; you don't even need to know if anyone else will get it. You just need to stop asking if it'll sell long enough to actually make the thing.

So yeah. Authentic who? This one, apparently. Even when it doesn't sell.

Paint on Chels, paint on lol 🎨

Aakuluuuuuk 💗

- C