Brock the Pirate is now Onyx Pirate! (Patreon)

Greetings everyone! 

As some of you might already know, I'd been contemplating the idea of renaming and rebranding myself for quite some time, and I've decided to finally pull the trigger and make the change! From now on, I'll be going by Onyx Pirate instead of Brock the Pirate! Though for now you can still call me Brock as a name. ;)

So why the name change? Well it's for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, I just wasn't really feeling the name anymore. "Brock" isn't a very pirate sounding name, and having an alias that follows the "[Name] the [Thing]" naming convention just didn't feel professional. 

Secondly, I wanted a name that was a bit more detached from any specific character and that allowed a little more freedom with associated theming. Onyx Pirate could just as easily be associated to a high fantasy pirate setting as much as a space pirate setting, and having it not contain a name also removes the importance of the specific character it's named after, which brings me to the third point, my personal identity. 

Friends and Eagle-eyed fans of my work might have noticed lately on social media that I've been making subtle tweaks to how I identify myself, opting for more broad spectrum identities. While I haven't been consciously trying to hide it, I also haven't been screaming to everyone to tell them, but I've recently-ish come to the realization that I identify as gender fluid. Brock has long had an opposite side of the coin in Brooke, my gender-swapped version of the character, and I want a bit more freedom to explore how that would affect the character's story, but doing so while loudly having the very clearly masculine name Brock labeled on my work felt... disingenuous.

But like I said before, you can still call me Brock for the time being. I'm still fairly masculine presenting and I'm not going to be bothered by folks continuing to think of me that way, but as time moves on I might do some more personal exploration on that front.

I will admit, I am a little sad to see the old name go, but it was well past it's time. I'd been going by that alias for 15 years, and during that time I had always wanted to take art more seriously as a profession, but until recently I haven't had the freedom to do so, so I suppose the last reason for making the name change is to signal a fresh start in my life, one where I treat my art as something that defines me both personally and professionally. 

Anyway, thanks for reading all the way to the end! I'm looking forward to what the future holds even as I'm coming off of some very, *very* tough times. Expect the changes in branding and on websites and artwork to take a little bit of time to fully populate. As I mentioned, the last couple weeks have been an absolute nightmare and I was originally planning on using that time to finish branding and identity assets, but sometimes life throws you a curve ball. Still, we keep moving forward!

Thanks again for your continued support!