We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Myc Daz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Myc below.
Myc, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?
This is a question every artist or artrepreneur thinks about every time we’re staring at a blank screen or canvas – scraping pennies together for dinner – chasing a client who hasn’t paid – had a month – or two – or three with no leads – worked their hands raw juggling multiple clients and timelines – had to borrow money from a friend or family – had an injury are fallen ill with no insurance – or had to navigate this experience with no mentor, support, or blueprint.
Hey’sus, take the wheel, por favor.
If ultimately, we decide to dip a toe into the real world for a season, eventually or true passion and joy comes calling. And that’s exactly where I stand today, back in the fire, after two years working as the Creative Director for a Commercial Real Estate and Urban Planning Firm.
I don’t believe artists create because we want to. We create because we HAVE to. It’s all I’ve done and wanted to do since my earliest memories. And more than the joy of the creative process, there’s a very real “sport” component — competitive component. Fueled by wanting to be a better artist than you were yesterday. And no matter how selfless an artist pretends to be, I believe that’s the force driving the lot of us. Our World Series or Super Bowl is the world, at scale, perceiving our art.
Perhaps that’s a projection, but that’s what I’m in for. Being employee — building the foundation for somebody else’s dream, has a ceiling: financially, professionally, foundationally.
Art has no limits.
Myc, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My government name is Mychal Batson, but for the better part of a decade I’ve gone by @MycDazzle. Now, Myc Daz. I majored in Business Marketing my first two years of college, but eventually switched to Creative Writing w/ and emphasis on Poetry and Screenwriting and a minor in Film and Graphic Design. Since a child, my dream was to create cartoons and movies. After graduating with honors and getting waitlisted at Columbia in NY for their MFA in Screenwriting, I thought I’d do just that, but life had other plans.
Cause I was poor.
After crashing back home, I devoured as much information as possible — on comic writing, marketing, design, urban planning — throwing ideas at walls hoping something sticks. Soon after graduating, for the first time in my life, though I’d always known it to be true, I called myself an artist, and the universe responded with opportunity.
I started posting my art and graphics online and people started asking if I could create for them. That was never my intentioned, but for the first time life felt like it had direction. Momentum. When I wasn’t working — far too many hours — I was creating, across medium. I had a mildly successful blog with friends, named circle squares. Wrote a spec script for a web series named, Post Grad, some friends and I tried to shoot unsuccessfully. Dropped a couple mixtapes. Taught Theater and Creative Writing at a handful of schools across the Twin Cities. Modeling, took photos, wrote poems, performed often — created.
Around 2016, I created my Creative Solutions Firm/ Agency, Discover Dope Creative along with my long-term creative partner, Aurum Oro. Because we both created across medium and partnered our craft with a deep understanding of people, marketing, and systems, we set out to solve whatever problem our clients presented to us, creatively.
Under the Discover Dope umbrella, I’ve painted murals all across the Twin Cities, designed Terrazzo floor’s, logos, campaigns, and a whole host of print and digital materials for entrepreneurs, nonprofits, corporate and government entities. I wrote, illustrated, and researched Frogtown’s (a micro-community in St. Paul, MN) Small Area Plan, or a ten year visioning of how the community would like to be developed. It received acclaim nationally as an innovate planning document. I got a midwest Emmy nomination for my character design and animation work on, “That Got Weird” a TPT production about racially charged micro-aggressions. I received a bush innovation grant for an ed-tech startup, named Schoolz, I created along with two good friends of mine. I
Of all the things I’ve accomplished, I’m most proud of the book I released, “DelRoy: A Christmas Story” because it was mine. That’s the downside to being a creative for hire. You own nothing. Your work isn’t yours. And after years of creating children’s books, brands, animations — intellectual property — for other people, and having nothing to show for it, I’m finally ready to go all in on my ideas. The success of that book.. the overwhelming support I received.. is just fuel I needed to push forward.
If there’s anything I want potential clients/ followers/fans to know is that deeply passionate about my craft and telling stories through my art that reflect the beautiful mess that is the human experience.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
A creative life, especially if your practice isn’t collaborative like theater, music, or film — is a solitary life. I don’t think non-creatives truly understand how many tabs we have open at all times, and how much bandwidth it requires to make an idea tangible.
Yet — we’re seen as flaky, unreliable, inconsistent, self-absorbed, etc etc — in a world increasing in complexity by the day. Juggling your creative life & the real world is often an exercise in futility. The two occupy very different parts of the brain and don’t place nice together.
If you’re creative that has a full-time gig to pay the bills on top of your creative pursuits, amplify everything above by ten.
Creatives build the world that we inhabit. We create your films, your music, design your chairs, your homes, your neighborhoods — everything visual or auditorial was touched at some point by a creative. We make our world worth living in and quite frankly deserve much more respect than we receive.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Life is a constant pivot. The most successful of us are the most agile. Everyday a new gadget or gizmo is created that will disrupt our entire ecosystem eg artificial intelligence and machine learning, the digitization of all media, streaming services, etc.
We never know when it’s our number that’ll be called next. In my life I’ve been a retail salesman, a bank teller, an educator, a camp counselor, a youth worker, an organizer, an illustrator, a designer, an urban planner, a business owner, a creative consultant, a creative director, a strategic planner, a digital nomad, a rock star, a model, a raging alcoholic, a chain smoker, chubby, fit as a fiddle, a hedonist, a stoicist, a hippie, an anarchist — and now all of these identities live inside me.
You a place me in any environment and I’m comfortable because I’ve lived aggressively.
During the pandemic, I packed up everything with a group of friends and moved to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico to escape the madness of my city burning down. I tore my achilles six months later and had to move to Houston for medical. All the while trying to run my edtech startup business, Schoolz.
Once my lease was up in Houston, my business relationship with my partners fizzled, money dried up, and I was tired of America again, so moved to Mexico City, MX sight unseen.
After landing some gigs, everything dried up as we adjusted to our new AI and template driven reality, streamlined by applications like Openai, Midjourney, Canva, and Envato. For the first time, people did NEED me to design or illustrate anything for them.
Eventually I had to bite the bullet and enter the job market for the first time in ten years. Not the easiest transition, to say the least. If not for one of my good friends owning a commercial real estate and urban planning firm, I would’ve been between a rock and hard place, but still was.
Had to move back to my home city, that doesn’t support a transitory lifestyle, and live with 7 strangers in art house. I moved two times after that before finally settling into my space. Now a year later, burnt out, and tired of staring at computers doing passionless work (though I love the intersection of design, marketing, and planning), I’m perched to take a leap — or pivot — yet again.
The goal here is joy and challenge. If one of the two are missing, that’s when we know it’s time to pivot. And the more we get comfortable pivoting, the more prepared we are for unforeseen circumstances.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.discoverdopecreative.com
- Instagram: @mycdazzle
- Facebook: @mycdaz
- Linkedin: Myc Daz
- Twitter: @mycdazzle
Image Credits
I own the images