This post is an advertisement for why you should never give up, and always practice. The illustration on the left was one of my very first illustrations six or seven years ago. Before that I don’t know that I ever even drew a single illustration.
Sometimes it can feel like you aren’t making any progress. I work for fourteen hours a day and I have days where absolutely nothing I do is “keepable.” But the upside is that even though I spent fourteen hours making mistakes, those are fourteen hours of mistakes that I will never make again. Sometimes I make an arm too long or too short or I use a color combination that turns out to not work. When that happens I just have to catalog it away- be more careful about arm length and don’t use those colors together again. It can be hard to work a long days when everything is going right, but when everything feels like a fail it takes a lot to keep pushing through. Motivation and excitement is easy when what you are doing is easy, but it takes a lot of discipline to work when you don’t feel motivation or excitement or when you are doing something that is difficult. But one of the products of working these long days week after week is that it really becomes automatic. I’m always motivated to work because I’ve just decided that I’m going to work every day. I’m going to work all day regardless of what I produce. Doing something is always better than nothing, and there is always SOMETHING I can do. And the best part is that I’ve found that frequently when I have those “mistake” days they are almost always followed by days where I do everything right.
