I had a blast last week, this week is more of a pain. What’s the difference? I took an extended weekend off and therefore lost all momentum. Now I’m fighting strong resistance to spend another lazy day every morning. It happens to all of us. Sometimes that voice is louder, sometimes you’re faster at your desk working before the thing even had it’s morning coffee and could try to dissuade you from starting. That is a great place to be in, a great amount of momentum. Obviously I can’t get back to me from last week but I can get my momentum back through doing the work. Also nobody is above breaks, we need them to process things or take care of matters that do not revolve around the craft.
The War of Art
I’m rereading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art right now and probably heavily influenced by it right now. Just by quantity it must be my favorite book. I’m reading it the third or fourth time now and I’m amazed how I still find new things that are relevant to me right now and weren’t before or how I could forget so many important points since the last reading. It teaches you the mindset how you actually get to write the book of your dreams, paint what you know you should have been painting years ago and so on. It can’t do the work for you though, that’s on you. What The War of Art can do really well is remind you that you are your worst enemy if you let your inner resistance get the better of you. Resistance almost becomes a mystical villain entity in the description of it’s nature and it’s ways, but maybe that is exactly the playful approach needed to cope with it. After all, if you are a creative, how do you like the prospect of lifelong anxiety and struggling and knowing it’s you that does that to yourself? And it will never go away. With discipline and experience you’ll just get better at distinguishing actual fatigue, actual important tasks that can’t wait from anything that broadly falls under comfortseeking and procrastination. Give The War of Art a chance, if you are interested in this cluster of topics. Steven Pressfield even gives a part of The War of Art away for free as a series of videos you receive when you subscribe to his newsletter.
Approval
And now I’m expanding on a nugget of wisdom from The War of Art that moves me a lot at the moment. Do not hope for things to become a success. Do not seek support or followers for support’s or followers’ sake. It is true that no one is waiting for your unproven creations with open arms, but you also do not need any approval by anyone to start making them. Seeking support and followers are open invitations for yourself to distract yourself instead of doing the work. This rings so true to me as it resonates with the experiences I’ve made over the years. I had my share of ambitiously trying to build a following on social media. To be fair, back then I had no clue what I was doing in general and how to get anywhere, so I’m excused. But other than that I never had success with anything of that sort. First I thought that was bad and that I maybe wasn’t born to be a successful independent artist if no one would ever validate me and no audience would ever show up. My opinion on this has been changing over the years though. I do have an audience. It is just not the stadium filling audience of a rock star. And it’s not in your hand whether someone likes your work, they do or they don’t. You can make everything right to please the highest amount of people in theory…and they might still be indifferent. Of course you can put effort into how you present your works and how you interact with other people, but you are not entitled to anything. Pressfield reminded me that the first task of the artist is not to garner a following or support before they even start creating, the task is to create the art. Not any art, but the art that the artist knows they truly want and should be creating if they are honest to themselves. While to some people this sounds obvious, it is usually the thing the artist is afraid of the most and has the strongest fears of getting hurt when it flops.
I have been also very confused in the past as I couldn’t give a simple statement about what type I am and how I would fit in into the art world. Trying to fit in probably is a waste of time, too, but you do want to have a direction you can work with. Therefore I was also confused what I am supposed to make. But as I like to say, mileage is the remedy. This time around good old mileage, the state and process of having drawn hundreds of pieces, hundreds of pages of it, is slowly giving me the answers I was craving.
I’m scared of concept art, therefore I should keep doing it
I was scrambling to become anything and of all things I became a concept artist. Funny enough, I’m apparently repeatedly telling my friends that I don’t think I have what it takes to be one, but I keep getting paid work in that field. I think what irks me about concept art is that it takes the design of things as one of the natural phases of creating art and declares that a finished thing. Other people give you briefs, tell you what you should do, and again, a group of other people, actually interpret your ideas and make the actual “assets” out of them and someone else got the last word of what makes it into the final product. I know a group of people can create bigger and more complex things than a solo creator, just because there are more man hours and more experts of various fields at work at the same time. But still, it feels unnatural to me to just generate ideas and not actually create, at least from the place of limited experience that I have right now. Maybe I will understand more after I have shipped a couple of games myself and worked on more projects. Also don’t get me wrong, concept design is an amazing and incredibly helpful field. My comic profits anytime I learn how to design things better. I guess my concept artist would take the work off my shoulders to have to design the costumes for the scenes, how the locations look like and what has to be there for it to look believable, what fixed light and color schemes I have for the scene, shot thumbnails and so on… but then I would draw the comic and people would just see that. Maybe I am making the same mistake, with a remnant of looking at things through the eyes of the audience, in awe about the vision that looks so consistent, focussing on the story told, not the nuts and bolts of what makes it work and how it does that.
Thinking about it, what if my past and current approach to SPREY is too complicated as it tries to follow the rules of a “professional” process usually undertaken by a team? Not trying to rationalize anything, just a thought. Maybe it is just a natural, flowing development. As I learn more about design, art fundamentals or anything, I’m eager to apply it to my work. Then things first blow out of proportion, take too long, frustrate me a lot, but once I’m used to it, I relax and things deflate again, now richer for a trick or two that I don’t have to look up every time when I want to use them and that keep influencing future work.
Back to defining myself though, I crave to release new zines. The Manul one and the Lickbook 2 one for example. It would feel so satisfying to have those finished and out. Not making the mistake to “hope” for a big breakthrough, it is for real about creating them, just as with SPREY. I’m happy if people enjoy them, but they don’t owe me.
