Hi everybody!
My name is Milo van Schaik and I am new to Steemit... I really have no idea how this works at the moment, but I hope I will get the hang of it soon.
To tell you a little bit about me, I am a half Dutch half Italian guy living in Italy. I have been working for 10 years on offshore Oilrigs but just over a year now I quit my job to pursuit my true passion,... Drawing!
It is not that I didn`t like my job, on the contrary. I loved my tools and every job was a big challenge to perform it successfully in a safe manner. The pressure involved due to potential life threatening risks which this line of works brings with itself combined to the all sacred "Time is (BIG) Money" motto, was enormous but this helped you to stay on the edge of your capacities and stimulated you to always give your very best, every day until the job was finished, all your stuff shipped back to the base and you could (if no other jobs were waiting) finally go home.
This environment also created the right atmosfere to trust and depend on the guys (and few girls!) working with you, creating a very strong bond which I never felt in any of the other jobs I did before joining the Oilfield.
(me when I was just a rookie :)
What made me quit you might wonder?
Well you might know that since several years the Oilfield is in a crises, which brought along (and for what I understand is still ongoing) drastic and continuous cuts in personnel. This was going hand in hand with growing regulations and procedures which limited more and more any personal "trouble resolving" skills and honestly, I had enough of that as well as the absolute focus on money and costs.
I do realize that to survive in our urban jungle "money" (which our currencies are not btw) play an essential role, but I have never based my decisions on money alone. I don`t have the ambition nor the will to get rich, I just want to be happy, being able to provide for myself and be involved in activities which I love, along with getting to know new and interesting people.
And this brings me to DRAWING!
I`ve had this passion since I was a little boy, and even if I never "studied" or got any education in drawing skills, I over time developed my own style which came naturally just by practising as much as I could. Since I quit my job however, I am refining my style with some study as I bought the book of Tom Richmond of the magazine MAD... Tom for me has always been an unlimited source of inspiration and I absolutely LOVE his work! I hope one day I might get close to his level of caricature!!
I am hoping I can transform my passion into my work in a way or another... I have been screenprinting and recently trying to develop videogames, but I have, until I didnt quit my job ,looked at those things purely as a fun thing for me to do,.. Some additional hobbies let`s say! But in all of this, to maintain full control over the creative part and the concepts expressed is, for me, essential! If you take that away it will end up being a regular job like another and I fear I might kill my biggest passion in life that way.
I am very sorry I can`t link to my Steemit profile any other social media such as FB, Instagram,ect. as, as time passed by I grew increasingly intolerant to how these platforms developed, and to much of the (superficial) content which I saw flapping by every day.
I sincerely hope this platform will never evolve to be the new FB or similar, and I have good hopes for it!
Instead I am thinking to open my own website soon, so I might share my drawings with you guys straight from my own site, and put a profile picture as well :)
Hope to meet a lot of you people out there and I`m looking forward to what this platform might bring my way!
PS: any comment or recommendation on how Steemit works is always very welcome!
Peace and a Ciao for now!
Milo
