nicoletteolivier

[nicoletteolivier]

⭐️Our Work is NOT Content⭐️

Hello, fellow makers of things!

This is an episode of my weekly show, and it's primarily focused on politics and current events, BUT, if you'd like to hear me talk about something I'm super passionate about: building community through supporting indie artists and creators, rather than corporations, skip to about the last ten minutes:

[nicoletteolivier]

⭐️Keep Tumblr Weird⭐️

[nicoletteolivier]

Also, I've never seen them fight in the yard. That seems a little suspicious.

I think my neighbors might be shape shifters. They seem nice and act normal, but every time I see them, they always look a tiny. bit. different.

[nicoletteolivier]

I think my neighbors might be shape shifters. They seem nice and act normal, but every time I see them, they always look a tiny. bit. different.

[nicoletteolivier]

⭐️SUPPORT LIVING INDIE CREATORS!! THE DEAD HOMIES DON'T NEED IT!!⭐️

[nicoletteolivier]

"Buster Stardust" is my most well-known piece. I know that because I regularly see other versions of it, and it is constantly being stolen and resold. That's an unfortunate reality that artists face, especially now in the age of AI. I haven't seen an AI ripoff of it yet, but I'm sure that's only a matter of time.

It was definitely a fun one, and one of my personal favorites. At the time, I wasn't thinking much about it, just that it it seemed like something I needed to do, but after, I was happy to see it resonating with so many people. Also, Bowie was a fan of Buster's (and had he gotten the chance, Buster would have been a fan of Bowie's), and I'm a fan of them both, so I liked getting to pull the two things together in a cosmic way (my favorite style of making anything, is getting to combine things from different eras and generes, but that's a story for another day!).

I've got more Buster projects in the pipeline, no ETA yet, but you can read about them HERE in one of my previous posts.

You can also purchase this image, sans watermarks, in my shop on a million different products HERE. I have a large magnet of it on my refrigerator, which is the adult version of showing what an important artist I am--you're all very impressed. BUT REMEMBER!! If you don't buy it from nicoletteabides on RedBubble, from the link above, it's a counterfeit low-quality image. Your money will go to a scammer, and you'll get something junky in return. If you buy from me, I get to continue to eat, and thus, make more rad shit.

Support living indie artists! The dead homies don't need it!

[nicoletteolivier]

⭐️Sic Semper Updates⭐️

After spending years jumping around from writing, to art, to film, managing each thing individually, I've finally been able to bring some kind of order to my works, even though it still feels like I just jumped off the merry-go-round, and my head is still spinning.

⭐️The Big Bad Wolf, my newest novel, a horror/mystery is going to be out November 28 on Amazon.

I'll be doing a cover reveal around the beginning of October to kick off spoopy season right, and will have some fun stuff coming out about what inspired the story, and some hint-a-roos about Easter eggs you'll find in it.

⭐️I've taken a look at, and done some light formatting for my next novel, a Western, the first to kick off a universe, with prequels, sequels, and side-stories, that I will be working on probably forever. Hoping for a release for that late 2026.

⭐️I do have more Buster stuff in the pipeline, too. I still have a lot of unpublished photos and artwork, so I'll have Another New World Volume II: A Life in Pictures coming, as well as a Keaton family cookbook, a collection of my art, and a secret project I'm not talking about yet, all on the way, but no ETA on those yet.

⭐️I've also got something cooking that's going to combine writing and artwork, something that--much to my frustration--should have occurred to me years ago, but that's too early in development to talk much about at this stage.

⭐️More obliquely, my novel and art-release WIP lists are about a mile long, so I'm going to have new content coming pretty regularly from this point forward, and will continue to update as I go.

[nicoletteolivier]

Without question, the very worst part of writing a book is the marketing process.

Second worse is formatting.

The research, managing contacts and schedules, interviews--it's absolutely exhausting. My Brian was not made to manage all of these things. I just want to make the things, I don't want to have to do all this administrative work. I do everything personally, too, so I don't make up press packets, there's enough manufactured bullshit out there, so all the more work for meeeeee.

At least now with this blort, I have somewhere to complain about it.

If everyone just buys The Big Bad Wolf and tells everyone they know about it, then I wouldn't have to do this. Flames. Flames on the side of my face.

[nicoletteolivier]

I really tend not to be a fan of unsolicited advice. Rarely is it very useful, and is usually so specific to the person giving it while broadcasted in a way that they want to portray it as enlightened and universal, it is almost always is the opposite.

That being said, on this blag, I have, and will continue to offer tips and words of encouragement, but I want to be clear that it's based on my own experience, and I don't see myself as some profound life-experiencer qualified to tell anyone anything.

If you get something useful out of something I've said, nice. If not, also nice. What works for you works for you for a reason, so beware of people that think they need to tell you (and everyone) how to do things, or what to think like they're showering you with little wisdom petals.

Everyone is stupid and just trying to figure it out, we're all just stupid in different ways, which can sometimes be helpful (but mostly isn't).

[nicoletteolivier]

This piece, "American Galactic", was my first Magical Realism painting. Really, it was my first digital painting at all. Everything I've ever done, I've taught myself, forever trying to answer the question "I wonder if I can do that", so I didn't have an established method, and I absolutely did not know what I was doing. Because of that, it's remarkable that anything close to what was in my head actually came out.

I'm really not even sure how it did come out, it was so complicated, I must have leaned on the technical aspect of it to ground me. I did use a lot of fancy brushes and jitter techniques, which I no longer do, typically, it's just a standard round brush, and I think I blended as I went, which I also no longer do, so all-in-all it would have made a tremendous amount of extra work for myself.

After this, I still didn't realize that I was onto something that I could work with and develop, and I ultimately didn't go back to it for a very long time. For a first-ever painting, it's kind of overkill, but if you're ever worried about wanting to do something without knowing how...don't let it stop you. Overkill it. Overkill the shit out of it.

[nicoletteolivier]

⭐️Beginnings Are Hard⭐️

This is the first time in all of my social media years where I’ve made myself some dedicated spaces to talking about what I’m creating and producing, which basically means, I have no idea where to begin.  Maybe beginnings aren’t that hard, but it’s the choosing where to start after years and years of making things, and not being in the particular habit of talking about it, or myself.  I’m not a poet, I couldn’t write song lyrics to save my life, and don’t even feel like I’m especially profound, but I can tell a story.  Whether through my paintings or writings, I can get across a thought like a motherfucker.

Although I am a firm believer that art and writing are for everyone, I also think if you’re serious about it, you can’t just set out to tell stories, you have to be willing to keep them, too.  From childhood, I listened.  I took in stories, information, facts, trivia.  Facts about how movies were made, special effects composed, strange stories of Old Hollywood celebrities, genealogy, the uproarious family rap sessions where everyone would be recalling shared experiences—so much so, that my first documentary, The Gordon Stories, is just that, my family sitting around recalling the ridiculous antics of my mother’s stepfather that seemed to work its way into everyone’s lives.  I have always seen myself as a keeper of stories.  Stories that aren’t even mine.

I don’t think that necessarily taught me how to write stories, all those years full of movie and tv analysis likely formed that more, learning what I liked, what worked, what didn’t, and as early as eight years of age, I was trying to teach myself to tell stories, in words and in drawings.  My family and teachers found this fascinating, as none of them were what you would describe as doers.  From the Boomer generation, they had the luxury of not having to do anything as a way of life. 

Myself as a Millennial was never afforded this, and from that time, I have been on a quest to do, and learn, and make, and tell, and express, and try, and hone as much as I can, as fast as I can.  It’s part of my survival instinct, with the quality of life being such dogshit and getting worse all of the time, I had to find ways to survive.  Not only this, but also knew from an early age that I wanted more.  I didn’t want to just exist, I wanted to surpass, I wanted to be an artist and a writer, I have always wanted to make a living on my own abilities.

I’m still working on that.  For as easy as it is to share, promote, and create in the modern age, people are less inclined to buy things, have less access to expendable income, and work that artists and writers have poured years of work into has been rebranded as content, quickly scrolled past and never thought of again.  Even still, I wouldn’t trade it.  As hard as it is to create visibility, the idea of working the tools and system is endlessly fascinating to me, and has me constantly scheming and thinking about how to utilize them for greater impact. 

To date, I’ve got hundreds of paintings, three documentaries, two of which available on YouTube to watch for free, and my third novel, The Big Bad Wolf will be out later this year, with a zillion more things in the pipeline.  Until now, my work was sporadic in release, and like spinning plates, I’d run from one thing to the next just to keep them from falling, but there was little homogeneity, due to some changes in style and management of just too many ideas, but I’ve finally gotten myself into a place where I can actually maintain a regular release schedule, and combine my skills to serve the same purpose that will get me there.  It’s the kind of thing that is endlessly frustrating to me, in that it was all so simple to thread everything together, but should have been the kind of thing I thought of ten years ago, and so here I am, back at the beginning. ⭐️

[nicoletteolivier]

Pshew! The beginning of the week is always a scramble for me. Producing and co-hosting a weekly podcast ends up pulling most of my mental and physical bandwidth, and after just getting this blog going plus the million-and-one other things I've got going at any given time, I'm still trying to get my sea legs.

I'll have some more content coming later today as I try and get some order in my life. Since I'm just getting this blog going, I could really use some followers. I'll be posting about my writing and art history, processes, projects, updates, and release news.

[nicoletteolivier]

It was actually eight years since I wrote the draft. Woops.

Welp. Pitter-patter.

The Creator's Death Wish

Thinking about pulling up my first draft manuscript of my next release.

I'm definitely not going to get seriously into it, for sure, 100 percent, definitely not.

I have a small window between getting seriously into The Big Bad Wolf promo work, and picking back up another running project I'll talk more about in the future, so naturally, I can't rest for five minutes and need to fill that time.

It took more than 20 years just to get it into some kind of beginning-middle-ending form, and that was about five years ago, when I had to stop work on it and BBW to work on Another New World. There's not a lot I can say about it at this point, especially since I don't even really know what it's like, never having been able to get back to it after writing the first draft. What I can say, is it's huge. A ton of planning and research went into it, with a page count of over 500 before formatting.

It was always intended to be a Western epic, and the intro to a universe, where there would be a running series, prequels, and side stories, so it's no surprise it's taken as long as it has, but in the building of the story, and the notes for subsequent stories, it grew bigger than the traditional Western topics, but still I wouldn't call it a Neo-Western, either. I'm not exactly sure what it is, at this point.

Given the size and scope, it's going to be a lot of work. I'm hoping for a 2026 end-of-the-year release, but that might be pushing it. Still, I've been dying to get back to it, so even though I've got a to-do a mile long, I've got to get the gears turning in my head about it again.

More info to come!!

[nicoletteolivier]

The Creator's Death Wish

Thinking about pulling up my first draft manuscript of my next release.

I'm definitely not going to get seriously into it, for sure, 100 percent, definitely not.

I have a small window between getting seriously into The Big Bad Wolf promo work, and picking back up another running project I'll talk more about in the future, so naturally, I can't rest for five minutes and need to fill that time.

It took more than 20 years just to get it into some kind of beginning-middle-ending form, and that was about five years ago, when I had to stop work on it and BBW to work on Another New World. There's not a lot I can say about it at this point, especially since I don't even really know what it's like, never having been able to get back to it after writing the first draft. What I can say, is it's huge. A ton of planning and research went into it, with a page count of over 500 before formatting.

It was always intended to be a Western epic, and the intro to a universe, where there would be a running series, prequels, and side stories, so it's no surprise it's taken as long as it has, but in the building of the story, and the notes for subsequent stories, it grew bigger than the traditional Western topics, but still I wouldn't call it a Neo-Western, either. I'm not exactly sure what it is, at this point.

Given the size and scope, it's going to be a lot of work. I'm hoping for a 2026 end-of-the-year release, but that might be pushing it. Still, I've been dying to get back to it, so even though I've got a to-do a mile long, I've got to get the gears turning in my head about it again.

More info to come!!

[nicoletteolivier]

I haven't been able to release any new artwork in a while, but I do have some more in the pipeline that I'll be able to talk about soon. I have always struggled with having to commit to writing or art, and not really able to do both at once, but I finally figured out a way to stitch the two together, so I can keep both up continually. More on that to come.

The cover release for The Big Bad Wolf is on the way, and I'm looking at the beginning of October for that one. Being a horror/mystery story, I think it'll be a good way to kick off spoopy season.

[nicoletteolivier]

JAWS celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, so please enjoy my painting "Y'all Know Me", of Quint (Robert Shaw). I painted this left-handed, and really enjoyed getting to capture Shaw's intense expression in the harsh light and shadow. (Stars are watermarks, not part of the actual painting) Available in my RedBubble shop on a zillion different products HERE.

[nicoletteolivier]

⭐️Some Links⭐️

⭐️My documentary on Buster Keaton, Oh Buster, Where Art Thou? the story of Buster's life as told by his friends, family, fans, and historians is available free to watch on YouTube HERE.⭐️

⭐️The follow-up book, Another New World, the biographic novel that takes a deeper dive into the life of Buster and his family in his later years, is available on Amazon HERE.⭐️

⭐️Tons of my artwork ranging from Magical Realism to vintage-inspired designs on thousands of products from stickers to clothes and home goods are HERE.⭐️

(My painting "Walter and Dude". The little stars are watermarks)